tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-439929001483088842010-07-29T13:45:04.538+01:00Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.comBlogger87125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-76601713101479432112010-07-09T16:29:00.005+01:002010-07-09T16:35:54.308+01:00

So yesterday's second big mistake, unreported at the time, was that I didn't take away half the dough before mixing in the new flour and putting it back. That's probably because I conflated two things: cutting off the dry rind from the outside, and managing the quantity of dough. Because my dough didn't have much in the way of a hard rind I mixed 100% of it with the new flour and put it back in

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-58196155797272714112010-07-08T12:58:00.037+01:002010-07-09T16:36:13.891+01:00

After several days collecting tools and ingredients (nobody sells simple room thermometers any more! I ended up buying an enormous garden thermometer in town—at least it's easy to read with my poor vision), I started my first desem dough last Monday, at about noon. The process is quite straightforward: mix two parts of wholemeal flour with about one part of filtered water and knead it into a

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-64704211358156199032010-05-28T08:07:00.032+01:002010-05-28T13:08:55.477+01:00

And so here we are in the middle of 2010 with the mass computing market at another tipping point. Everybody can feel it, the calm before the storm; the only question is, which way is it going to go? On the day that Apple's "magical and revolutionary" iPad goes on sale in the rest of the world, pity poor Microsoft. After pushing the tablet format (in one incarnation or another) fruitlessly for

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-14808407264977265552010-05-28T07:51:00.000+01:002010-05-28T07:51:14.553+01:00

"Yet the surface is where the movie stays, like an old submarine with dead batteries" (the WSJ reviewing Sex and the City 2). Well, like an old something with dead batteries, anyway.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-31359005464120205742010-05-20T21:25:00.016+01:002010-05-21T00:50:49.225+01:00

See webmonkey and The Register for details. The open sourcing aspect was long expected, but by tying in Adobe Google seems to me to have made a typically smart end-run around Apple (and Microsoft, but it's really Apple whose face we're loving to punch, isn't it guys?). So Google will update YouTube and suddenly half the video on the web will be in the VP8 format, and Adobe will update Flash

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-81315216892199348842010-05-17T05:21:00.003+01:002010-05-17T05:36:54.139+01:00

Angela Merkel: "[It's] a battle of the politicians against the markets ... I am determined to win." King Canute: "Sea, I command you to come no further! Waves, stop your rolling! Surf, stop your pounding! Do not dare touch my feet!"

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-50316340025045642602010-05-08T21:40:00.003+01:002010-05-08T21:59:43.623+01:00

I see Gordon Brown is still causing trouble for the country, this time by squatting in number 10 and refusing to go. If he needs a hint then we could ask Her Majesty to send in the yeomen from the Tower of London to winkle him out with their pikes. In fact if they then took him to the tower and put him in the stocks, I for one would pay good money to throw ordure at him. It could be his little

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-73387810024181900992010-04-30T06:03:00.002+01:002010-04-30T06:06:32.081+01:00

It always surprises me how many people think it is wrong to burden future generations with problems like exhausted natural resources, or a polluted biosphere or an atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, when so few people seem to care about leaving them with a mountain of debt.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-36540681743453684022010-02-18T17:01:00.004Z2010-02-18T17:30:38.587Z

It's now looking as though Greece could be in default at any time. Those delicious-looking interest-rate swaps that they entered into with Goldman Sachs ["I'll just have one more!"] may be about to come back and bite them in the tail even more firmly than we thought. Zero Hedge has an article revealing that one more credit rating downgrade either for Greece itself or (and even more easily done

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-10749490504541133642010-02-15T17:51:00.002Z2010-02-15T18:15:56.350Z

So Intel has finally thrown in the towel on creating its own mobile platform based on Linux. Disguised, naturally, as a triumphant victory, uniting its Moblin product with Nokia's Maemo so that together they may go onwards to storm the bastions of Android and iPhone. But everyone can see that MeeGo, the combined offering, will really be Maemo with a few extra bells and whistles. Most imortantly

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-59826363762796486812009-12-19T21:37:00.004Z2010-05-28T13:16:02.152+01:00

This image has been doing the rounds of the economics and investment blogs lately, and so of course I can't pass by without adding my six penny [or 144 Zimbabwe Dollars—ed.] worth. It's rather spoiled by the fact that, apparently, Zimbabwe is now experiencing deflation, after switching its economy to using a basket of world currencies rather than the old Zimbabwe dollar, but let's cast our

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-88746391903855096192009-12-07T18:21:00.002Z2009-12-07T18:24:15.867Z

"Deflation in a fractional reserve banking system means policymakers have, for all intents and purposes, lost control of the economy." Difficult to argue with that one, whatever you may think of the rest of the author's argument.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-45704088765617994262009-11-16T15:07:00.004Z2009-11-16T15:18:47.991Z

Another airy, breezy little piece from the BBC. Apparently Col. Gaddafi rounded up 200 young Italian women, in Rome, home of the Catholic church and one of Christianity's holy cities, and harangued them for two hours on the wonders of Islam, urging them to convert. Of course, the BBC does its best to tell the story in a laugh-a-minute style (that Gaddafi, what a card!) But I wonder what

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-71275179950658037082009-10-24T16:42:00.003+01:002009-10-24T16:47:28.851+01:00

"The good news out of the bad news is that because money [currently] has no velocity, we have no inflation." (Brackets mine.) From CNBC's A Conversation with Art Cashin, UBS. Governments have turned the printing presses on but the banks are not lending for economic activity. Instead, all that money is propping up real estate prices and powering another bubble on the stock markets.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-59783612089847770032009-09-06T02:32:00.002+01:002009-09-06T02:39:27.404+01:00

OK this isn't exactly a new word, I've come across it many times without ever being sufficiently bothered to look up its exact meaning. That's often an acceptable modus operandi when you can make a believable (if only to you) guess at a word's meaning, but that's something I never really managed to do with "externalities" — the best I managed was that it referred to something nasty. So here's

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-22996142776342942452009-08-28T19:28:00.004+01:002009-08-28T19:53:01.537+01:00

I've discovered Ultimi Barbarorum, and immediately added it to the subscriptions list of my now-groaning Google Reader. Immediately, that is, after reading this excellent posting which opened my eyes to what exactly senior management (especially in the States) is doing with all those share buybacks. To some extent he's only pointing out the obvious, but it's depressing just how often I don't

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-45867023821589363142009-08-22T14:42:00.005+01:002009-08-22T22:34:29.858+01:00

This is the second posting prompted by something I read today at FuturePundit. Commenting on news that a new proprietary strain of algae has been bred to increase its uptake of CO2 (and hence its production of fuel hydrocarbon) in high-light conditions, Randall says that "The rate of growth of algae is just one of several factors that affect biodiesel algae costs. Another big factor is

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-3934531741756632902009-08-22T14:02:00.010+01:002009-08-22T14:35:08.408+01:00

First of a couple of posts stimulated by reading FuturePundit. One Katsuhiko Saido of Nihon University seems to have said, in a presentation to the American Chemical Society: “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-45928903632589896662009-08-20T22:35:00.003+01:002009-08-20T22:37:55.400+01:00

Not exactly unfinished, since I've already started using it! But I want to record the original url somewhere. I'm talking about Bill Katz' very nice full text indexing for App Engine.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-37845165533821026572009-08-03T03:12:00.006+01:002009-08-22T14:31:13.038+01:00

This and this and particularly this may go some way to explain why the UK government used anti-terrorism laws to freeze the British assets of the Icelandic banks when they went bust, a move that was widely decried at the time. Iceland was always a beautiful country with good, hard-working people, but now there's something rotten in the state of Iceland and it's not just a load of old cod. The

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-38647961251768785662009-07-12T09:53:00.007+01:002009-07-12T10:24:13.920+01:00

www.czechpropertysearch.co.uk. A nice little site, they sound enthusiastic and they don't look like ripoff merchants. I imagine Czech property prices may have become even more affordable in the past several months. The Czech Republic looks like a delightful place to visit, perhaps to live. Here's an interesting blog written by a British woman who took the plunge into Czech property. If you

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-11368202149330560782009-07-11T02:42:00.007+01:002009-07-11T03:03:23.105+01:00

So Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has described the ethnic violence in China's Xinjiang region as "a kind of genocide". Now at last we know then, what the Turkish authorities consider to be "genocide": it's the death of 47 people and the injury of few hundred others. Well, not just any old people exactly. Just some people, apparently. Because the Turkish authorities do not

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-7834765154756722832009-07-08T12:09:00.002+01:002009-07-08T15:59:26.366+01:00

I must admit, a new netbook OS from Google, and one that's not based on Android, did rather surprise me. Though there had been mutterings that Android's single-window approach, which just right for phones and (perhaps) internet tablets, was not rich enough for netbooks and (certainly) laptops and desktops, where a multiple simultaneous windows are required. So the base is Linux, but the

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-88022678768276507722009-06-29T18:49:00.001+01:002009-06-29T19:04:13.501+01:00

"Grassoline": second-generation bio fuels made from the inedible parts of plants. Hat tip to Scientific American.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43992900148308884.post-23192430490351090902009-06-24T02:20:00.006+01:002009-06-24T02:28:39.836+01:00

Hat tip: otoshimono the blog. The most unnerving thing, to my mind, is not the sea angel itself, but the continued laughter of the watchers.

Gedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08293434002371009590noreply@blogger.com0