Tom Womack

At least, I think kittens are proverbially slow and graceless swimmers.

Managed a kilometre this evening - 40 lengths of Parkside, changing stroke every six lengths to ward off some of the boredom. It took just under ninety minutes; I found that two consecutive lengths of brisk front crawl (where 'brisk' means 40 seconds for the 25 metres) raised my heart rate to 180, one minute's rest got it down to 120 and another minute got it to 100. For comparison it goes up to about 150 on the stair-climbing machine and stays there, and tended not to get even that high on the treadmill (when the treadmill was working).

What would be wonderful is to try swimming with someone who not only can swim but can tell me what I'm doing wrong; I find I can't get any speed at all from my legs, it takes over two minutes for me to do a length holding a float in both arms and getting my propulsion from swimming furiously.

Weird weather this evening; low-contrast clouds and haze enough to cloud one side of Parker's Piece as seen from the other, the sun setting as a visible disc rather than an actinic blare. Rather reminiscent of Bangkok.

In England, if your employer wants you to attend a three-day conference, Monday to Wednesday, in Tblisi, the traditional way to proceed is to purchase with your employer's credit card a flight leaving Heathrow Friday evening and arriving Tblisi at an uncivilised hour Saturday morning and a flight leaving Tblisi Sunday lunchtime and arriving Heathrow at a reasonable hour Sunday evening, to take two days of vacation, and to use this to get yourself five days in Tblisi along with the conference; this means you arrive at the conference bouncy and efficient, having spent two days in the Georgian sunshine to cure your jet-lag, then get three days in the unsurpassed beauty of the Georgian mountains before returning home.

If you are Swedish, the government regards this as a benefit in kind for taxation purposes, and the forms you'd have to fill in to give the employers the tax they'd have to pay on it are sufficiently onerous that employers don't offer this option.

I have demonstrated that it takes a PhD mathematician an hour and three quarters, also five sheets of expensive label-printing card and three of normal paper, to prepare two dozen name badges.

The secret is to print on normal paper, then hold the thing up to the light with a sheet of expensive card behind it to check that the text on the cards fits entirely within the perforations. One might have thought that Word could, knowing the size of the cards as it does, refrain from resizing the cells in the table it makes to hold the names to a size other than that of the cards; but one would have thought this in error.

If there is to be a company logo on the bottom of the cards, it is on the side of smallness that the dimensioning of the table cells should err, since if the logo spans two cards, it makes both of them worthless. Word, naturally, errs by default in the other direction.

I get this feeling that temping may not be for me.

This weekend, I have bought and planted twenty marigolds, ten white snapdragons, ten burgundy snapdragons, ten blue lobelias, two white-flowered fuchsias, two yellow gerbera-like things, a large daisy, a purple gerbera-like thing, and a Venezuelan plant with purple feathery cones of flowers which I have naturally christened Hugo. Also 75 litres of compost and 75 litres of topsoil, 25l of which I have put in the large hole in the ground from which I excavated the buried vacuum cleaner on Thursday. I would have bought and planted a great big bag of broad beans, but apparently it's almost exactly the wrong time of year for them.

On Saturday, I cycled to Grantchester, had tea with naath and ptc24, and cycled back again. I have attended a barbecue chez antinomy and rmc28, paddled in the pool and eaten barbecued gammon steaks.

Today, I have cycled to Audley End (1:40 door to door) and back (1:20 door to door); it's quite an impressive house, though probably best to go there later in the summer, when you're not obliged to take a guided tour and can stare in wonder at the three rooms full of cabinets of taxidermy - they have a passenger pigeon, and an extremely disturbing entire cabinet full of owls. If the plan to get Great Bustards reintroduced on Salisbury Plain works out, I see I will have to go there and admire them; they're enormous.

The garden's also good, Capability Brown vistas with hahas everywhere. There's an urn with a monument to the Free Poland resistance members trained at Audley End by the SOE during World War 2; that's not an episode I'd heard of before, presumably because Free Poland didn't end as well as Free France.

I am tired now, and slightly wishing that I could install a spare set of knees; I will have a bath, eat pasta, then curl up in the living room with a good book until I feel sufficiently sleepy.

Somebody at post-pizza on Monday left their Leatherman on my dining-room table.

Whilst this would be a really generous gift, I assume they probably want it back.

If it was you, could you mail me and say so?

What I do if I receive more than one reply is as yet undecided, but I trust in the honesty of my friends and the degree of repetition that this particular prisoner's-dilemma is doubtless to undergo ... after all, pizza happens every Monday, and this time I'll have a Leatherman.

I'll be going to see X-Men 3 at 8pm at the Grafton Centre cinema.

Would anyone like to join me?

I had my first dental checkup in three years, and my teeth remain fine. Tech level has advanced again: I was given a small plastic-wrapped CCD imager to hold in my mouth for the X-rays, rather than a film holder, and my teeth were on a laptop screen within moments.

If I read the notes on the X-ray source correctly, it's 65keV; hc/E is then about 0.2 angstroms, which seems a surprisingly hard X-ray - I'm used to CuKa sources at 1.54A and synchrotrons that run at 1.00A. Does anyone have a reference for the X-ray absorption spectrum of air?

The toothache-like thing that has afflicted me for the last month is not tooth-related, but inflammation of the socket of the ball-and-socket joint at the right-hand side of my jaw; I'm told a major cause of this is grinding one's teeth together at night out of stress. I can take ibuprofen and hope it goes away, I can meditate constantly on the need to keep my teeth slightly apart when doing anything other than eating, or I can get the dentist to have made for me a small plastic cap to keep my teeth from grinding.

Generic ibuprofen costs 10p a tablet, and I should take three tablets a day. The custom-made small plastic cap costs three hundred pounds; it appears to be patented in such a way that it has to be manufactured by American dentists at USAnian-health-care costs.

I've just been introduced, on james_nicoll's journal, to the Gridded Population of the World dataset: some kind demographers have divided the world into six-square-kilometre chunks and counted the people in them.

This lets me calculate the crowdedness metric, which is the average over each person in the population of the population density of the region that person lives in. This means that Canada Russia a country containing three incredibly crowded cities amidst endless desolate uninhabited wasteland gets a figure corresponding to the cities rather than the wasteland; it's about the metric that I imagine people actually using when complaining that their country is too crowded.

High-ranking places: well, of course the city-states of Hong Kong, Singapore and Macao are at the top. The next few are

1. Egypt (mostly desert and everyone lives in Cairo)


2. South Korea


3. Jordan (a small country, but 95% desert)


4. Yemen (ditto)


5. Greece


6. The Philippines


7. Bangladesh


8. Peru


9. Japan


10. Vietnam


11. Indonesia


12. Taiwan


13. Lebanon

A biased sample of countries whose position in the ranking by density and perceived-density is similar:

Thailand, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, Iraq, China, Taiwan, India, Israel, Hungary, UK, Austria

Countries with low density but high perceived density (that is, very concentrated population, or, if you prefer, vast tracts of desolation):

Russia, Gabon, Argentina, Canada, Peru, Australia, Brazil, CentralAfricanRepublic, Surinam, Paraguay, South Africa, Chile

Reasonable-sized (population >4 million) countries with high density but low perceived density (that is, very uniformly spread population):

Serbia, Bosnia, Burundi, Syria, Rwanda, Nepal, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, Turkey

Jared Diamond writes of Burundi and Rwanda as being pretty much at carrying capacity at tech level, and I could imagine the same being said of Nepal (and Bhutan, which would be on the list were it larger); that's very strange company in which to find Germany. Albania would also be high on the list were it larger; is it ridiculous to imagine Tito and Hoxha as having pursued deliberate projects of decentralisation?

Are dentists uniquely awful at answering phone calls?

I asked NHS Direct for a list of nearby dentists, started ringing round at lunchtime, and they all either failed to answer, or directed me to an answering machine saying 'ring back between 9am and 5pm'.

The nearby doctor will register me without trouble and give me an appointment tomorrow to decide whether what I've had for a week is ear-ache or tooth-ache; with luck they'll also fix it. It's not been particularly painful, but it got noticeable at night.

Did you know that the US was more than 41 times the size of Portugal and Belarus combined? That Russia was more than 405 times the size of Denmark? That India was just under 78 times the size of Lower Saxony?

This kind of useful information is a side-effect of a proxy I've always wanted to write to remove the parochialisms in the CIA World Factbook - it's of little use to point out that some place is twice the size of Oregon. I haven't quite figured out how to set it up as a proxy yet (and also would rather avoid things that could be construed as imitating the CIA]