Tom Womack

I've had two elaborate restaurant meals in Cambridge this week, which is two more than I have most months.

The first was last Wednesday ghoti's 29th birthday, for which she'd booked the downstairs room at 22 Chesterton Road. They had excellent bread: a really malty, cinnamonny fruit loaf, a really nutty brown and a really rosemary-ridden white. I had a red wine risotto as starter, wonderfully fishy haddock served on some kind of seaweed base as main course, and a particularly unsubtle pudding composed of a lake of salt-caramel inside a square of chocolate hazelnut mousse, served with chocolate and milk sorbets and a wafer-thin hazelnut biscuit the shape of Wisconsin.



After one evening of gourmet delectation, proposals for a second evening of gourmet delectation go down more easily; I'd been looking forward to seeing nou, who I'd met at Oxford and not seen for years, on Wednesday but she couldn't make it. So she organised another meal, at the newly-opened Alimentum on Hills Road; me, nou, ewx and karen2205 who I'd encountered on IRC but never in person.

Leather chairs, wall-covering seemingly made of satin pillows, a big glass window to encourage people-watching if only the Cambridge Leisure Centre was a haunt of people worth the watching at eight on a Tuesday evening, slightly intrusive background music, a general sense of slightly OTT deliberate poshness. Cocktails to start - gin and blackberry for me. As a starter, smoked eel, served with potatoes, microtomed artichoke and a couple of thin slices of truffle, little cubes of tasty jelly which on request turned out to be balsamic-vinegar flavour. Clearly excellent eel, though I'm not sure truffle in slices is a taste I'm so keen on. The others had a single chicken raviolo served with mushrooms and baked jamon iberico.

The main meal for me was lamb done three ways; slices of neck cooked pink, a sweetbread (I had traded haddock for a bit of uisgebeatha's sweetbread at the previous restaurant, and liked the dumpling texture and sheep-pate taste), and a little pot of a moussaka made with lamb braised to dissolution, and raisins. Others had bavette of beef - a very large slab of beautifully-cooked cow - and sea bass.

For dessert (nou has pictures) I had a deconstructed apricot crumble; a clingfilm-thin piece of hard caramel, a swoosh of apricot jus, a blob of just-barely-mashed apricot, and an ice cream, topped with crumble topping, that itself tasted of crumble topping.

These are both fancy restaurants - 22 was £45 a head, Alimentum £55 a head, wine and service included - but both worth it when you've assembled a critical mass of friends to whom the prospect of really fantastic food is more appealing than money. I only have to forgo Monday pizza and Thursday liver-and-bacon at the pub for the month of August to break even, and it's probably well worth it.

I often look at satellite photos in the sort of circumstances where one might more usually stare out of the window for inspiration; it's always good to confirm that my brother is baking in Andalucian sunshine while Cambridge is dripping with Fenland rain. This morning the gods of cloud and of orbital mechanics have conspired together well, and offered this (4481 by 7488-pixel JPEG file) nice photo from ENVISAT, taken at about lunchtime and showing a swathe across England and Ireland, and down across the Bay of Biscay, via the tip of Brittany, to Asturias and down the east coast of Iberia to beyond Lisbon. If you find 32-megapixel images cumbersome, there's a half-megapixel version if you click on the thumbnail to the side of this paragraph.

I've been vaguely looking for satellite photos that show the extent of the recent flooding, but freely-available satellite photos are at a resolution of sixteen pixels per square kilometre, and unavoidably flooding is correlated with rain, which is correlated with cloud, which is opaque to satellites; the weather's fine with little fluffy clouds at the moment, but as you see there are an awful *lot* of little fluffy clouds.

What really struck me in that photo is this cut-out bit below. I suspect the conditions are just right for contrails to persist, and I've brightened and sharpened the image in ways that make them show up slightly better than they do in the original, but all the way from Devon to Cork the main features are contrails.

And I am an optimist, so despite the total failure of the last flower-recognition, here are some more Miscellaneous Flowers if anyone recognises them

I think the top right is a marigold; the bottom right grows on a very flimsy stalk; the bottom left grows very close to the ground; the top left is the shy blue flower of my previous posting

This week, I am mostly learning Fortran 90.

It's a language which nicely matches the sort of code I like to write; arrays as really first-class language elements are good, and the DWIM read() and write() statements avoid some of the more tiresome boilerplate that typed languages attach to I/O.

I assume there are Fortranophones among my readers; is there a nicer way to write


atomcounts(fooi(1),fooi(2),fooi(3)) = &
1+atomcounts(fooi(1),fooi(2),fooi(3))
?

The obvious
atomcounts(fooi) = atomcounts(fooi)+1
translates as
atomcounts(fooi(1)) = 1+atomcounts(fooi(1))
atomcounts(fooi(2)) = 1+atomcounts(fooi(2))
atomcounts(fooi(3)) = 1+atomcounts(fooi(3))


which is a rank error since atomcounts is a 3D array; also, is there an increment-in-place procedure that I'm missing?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2115773,00.html

has the content-free (given that it's from the Observer) title "Organic food under threat".

As far as I can see, they've just discovered that food grows on farms, that there are only finitely many farms, that each farm has only finite yield, and that the reason that farmers moved away from organic food in the first place is that a given amount of land produces a whole lot more food when sown with aggressively-bred grain, fertilised with carefully-bound phosphorus, and freed of pests with targeted insecticides. The demand for organic food in England has just reached equality with the supply, at which point it has to grow at a rate in which new farms can be brought into production, rather than at the rate by which a consumer whim can inflame.

England can't feed England even with the utmost available refinements of agricultural technology. England hasn't been able to feed England with the greatest available refinements of agricultural technology since about 1900 - ask any U-Boat commander. So I'm surprised that people are now surprised to find that England can't feed England if its inhabitants request it to do so with one fertiliser factory tied behind its back.

Of the last 624 books that I've recorded reading in my book spreadsheet, which I started in March 2001 (so a fairly steady two books a week),

three (two John Barnes books and one of rezendi's) I read between zero and two days before buying them, then bought in order to encourage the author to write more.

10% I read within one day of acquisition
20% I read within two days of acquisition
50% I read within two weeks of acquisition
75% I read within three months of acquisition
90% I read within thirteen months of acquisition

The longest gap so far is just under six years, including four house-moves, between borrowing Midnight's Children and finishing it; on the other hand, there are 142 books that I've recorded buying and haven't recorded reading, of which the oldest is a copy of Nevil Shute's On the Beach that I picked up in April 2001 in the States.

I think a person more averse to clutter than I might contemplate donating to a second second-hand bookshop the set of books picked up in second-hand bookshops more than two years ago and not yet read. I've read only the lower-brow half of the intimidating pile I bought at Eastercon 2006.

Random data harvested from the World Factbook and a small spreadsheet; these are real dollars rather than PPP-adjusted dollars. Units are billions of dollars.

Place	Debt	External debt	Govt annual revenue	Govt annual spending	Revenue / GDP
Estonia	0.49	13.9	5.99	5.72	44%
Latvia	1.77	18.9	6.17	6.45	38%
Lithuania	5.43	15.1	9.42	9.76	31%
Romania	16.94	42.8	36.89	39.1	47%
Bulgaria	7.13	24.3	13.28	12.16	48%
Slovenia	10.92	29.1	15.9	16.35	42%
Czech Republic	34.6	50.2	57.88	62.53	49%
Slovakia	16.93	31.5	24.57	26.14	52%
Poland	165.13	147.3	62	71.3	18%
Hungary	77.59	107.3	48.7	59.6	43%
Greece	243.2	301.9	99.2	106.7	43%
Uruguay	10.1	11.4	5.2	5.45	36%
Chile	4.36	47.6	36.71	26.68	32%
USA	8600	10040	2409	2660	18%
UK	990	8280	973	1040	41%
Germany	1930	3904	1277	1344	44%
France	1400	3461	1150	1211	53%
Russia	60	287.4	222.2	157.3	30%
Canada	710	684.7	183.5	181.8	17%
Japan	8700	1547	1411	1639	29%
Italy	1920	1957	832.9	925	47%

Chile has the great advantage in the contemporary world that some of its many, many mountains are made out of copper, and that it's arranged a sensible royalty deal with the companies that are converting these mountains into water pipes and sending them to China; this explains in part how it manages to earn so much more than it spends whilst having negligible debt; Russia has that advantage raised to a high power. Estonia and Canada are famously sensible. But I really hadn't expected Bulgaria to join them in the league of fiscal prudence; in particular, I don't quite see why it doesn't make sense for Bulgaria to borrow another ten billion dollars, build what infrastructure it lacks (of course, maybe it has all needful infrastructure already), and repay over fifteen years of the budget surplus.

I hadn't realised that Western countries tended to have public debts of a good 60% of GDP, meaning (assuming interest rates at 6%, which is precisely what beingjdc is telling us not to assume) 4% of GDP, or about 10% of government income, goes on debt service; I hadn't really realised how much less tax the US, Canada and Poland (another odd juxtaposition) took in in comparison to EU countries.

On the other hand, the biggest and nearest object in low Earth orbit, and startlingly visible as it swept majestic and orange across the sky, horizon to horizon in a couple of minutes.

500mm lens, hand-held, short exposures (it's in full sunlight, so 1/1000 f/11 is reasonable), hold down the button and pray that at least once the shutter fires while the camera is momentarily stationary:



The grey rectangle on the right is one of the Space Station's solar panels, the white splodge on the left is the space shuttle Atlantis.

Advice on achieving critical focus at infinity with long lenses hand-held would be appreciated.

Smaller, and closer to home, does anyone recognise this splendid orange-spotted, four-tufted hairy bestiole that I found on a bramble?

This weekend, I (and many others: naath, damerell, Jason, Ben-who-doesn't-climb, crazyscot, lnr and Mike, Sarah hazyjayne, Pete, probably some other people I've forgotten) helped move ceb and Ian the not-on-LJ, from the four-bedroom house that they had been living in since 1998 to a three-bedroom house a mile or so away.

Ten until eight on Saturday, packing and moving boxes, followed by a large (duck and more duck; Infinite Chinese Main-Dish Assortment; deep-fried battered apple bits covered in gorgeous hard sesame toffee) and vinous meal at the Hotpot, then lnr's house-warming at which I fear I wasn't awake enough to be a worthy party contribution; then eleven until ten on Sunday, dismantling and moving furniture, followed by take-out pizza. The work-crew was about half a dozen, mutating slightly over the course of the weekend.

Compared to work, it was surprisingly relaxing: it's a task which splits into maybe three hundred individual components, each of which can be done in a few minutes and is then finished. There's some higher-level modularity as you figuring out what goes sensibly in each van-load; there are some bits for which you need to develop and refine a process and then carry it out repeatedly - getting the larger and more cumbersome double-beds down a rather narrow stairway with a ninety-degree bend in it, for example. There are various minor exercises of command as A instructs B and C in the movement of a wardrobe of monumental bulk and even more monumental height around a corner of distressingly inadequate radius.

But there's a very clear definition of the scope of the problem and of what constitutes success, there's an absolute guarantee that the problem is in fact solvable, the general methods that will solve it are well-understood, there's at least one useful trick to apply (I happened to have borrowed from the office a pallet-truck that makes moving white goods a straightforward exercise), and the degree of progress at any intermediate moment was clearly visible and clearly monotonically increasing. In none of these respects does it really resemble scientific research at all.

It is, however, good that today is a bank holiday which I can spend doing very little, slothfully.