Author: richard

The idea of a flat tax appeals to me because of the simplicity. Maybe one day a tax return will be just one page.

The things you learn watching QI actually are quite interesting. Here in the UK VAT is not charged on cakes, or on biscuits unless “wholly or partly covered in chocolate (or some product similar in taste and appearance)”. This led to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (née Customs and Excise) investigating the Jaffa Cake. The ruling rested on the fact the biscuits go soft when stale, whereas cakes go hard when stale. Jaffa Cakes go hard and are therefore cakes, and not subject to VAT. The clue’s in the name.

For those who want the full rules, you might want to look at HM Revenue and Customs Notice 701/14 (PDF) which helpfully clarifies that VAT does apply to “any item of sweetened prepared food, other than cakes and non-
chocolate biscuits, which is normally eaten with the fingers.”

I’ve only just found citystats.org, which gives information and maps for Brighton. The mapping is pre-google maps so it feels clunky, but on the other hand the data is Ordnanace Survey to 100m (meters) plus photos to that sort of level too. I couldn’t find any mention of Jedis in the census data for religion, so that must have been bucketed into “other”.

I stumbled on this while researching the proposed changes to central Brighton parking, and how it would effect our street: £3 per hour pay and display parking, double yellow lines elsewhere.

The gay pride parade and festival was excelent. I’ve not been to the Brighton one before, but apparently it was the
best yet with more than 120,000 in attendance.

There are pictures scattered here and there around flickr.

Watching many many people doing the actions to a certain village people song while following a bus was a memorable sight, not quite captured by the video, but it gives you the idea (best with sound on):

The other week I had a business meeting in Manchester, and, to cut a long story short, there’s no good way to get Brighton to Manchester for a day trip unless you hire a helicopter. I didn’t hire a helicopter, although I did look into that option.

Of the sane options — drive, train, fly — the cost/time/environment equation for a trip was surprising to me.

By car the journey would have taken 5hr 30mins (one way), pushed out about 0.21 tonnes of CO2 and cost something like £180+ as I would have to had hired a car for this journey the way things panned out. I’m not willing to drive 11 hours in one day.

I don’t know what the CO2 would be like for the train trip (I suspect the lowest) but it was the most expensive at £250 — I had no idea it was possible to pay so much for a standard one-day return fare. That trip would have taken 4+ hours with two changes and a taxi. Not too bad.

The option I went for was to fly: including taxis and taxes and trains and waiting around at airports it worked out to £220 and a 3hr 50min door-to-door trip. And less CO2 than the car, at 0.06 tonnes. That’s the part I can’t understand. Maybe I’m not using the calculator correctly, or have I misunderstood the air-travel-will-destory-the-planet reports?

I’ve been away in San Francisco for a conference. Pictures are now available. Things of note…

The Virgin Atlantic flight was one of the best I’ve been on. The on-demand entertainment was good, but the happy helpful staff made the biggest difference. Being able to send SMS from the plane was fun (US$2.50 to send; US$2.00 to receive), although my message was basically “hey, cool, I’m 32 thousand feet above Greenland!”. It seems like the message really did go at that time — rather than waiting to land, which I would consider to be cheating. Alas, the replies sent never made it to my seat.

Thank you Loren for taking us to Foreign Cinema for dinner. My first Mojito — what a fool I’ve been for missing out on this for so long.

We stumbled into
Massawa on Haight St for some yummy East African food. Must remember for next time.

And finally…. Somehow — and I’ve no idea how — Goul got onto the subject of Fainting Goats. In case you can’t see the video on that link, these look like normal goats, but when they get scared their legs stiffen and they fall over.

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized I’d seen fainting goats in real life on a previous trip to California. I didn’t see them fall over. I think there might have been a sign saying not to scare them.

Putting aside the entertainment value, this was being thrown up as a kind of “you think evolution is good, eh? Well what about these goats?”. And you have to admit that fainting because your scared isn’t a great survival strategy for an animal. At least not compared to running away from a predator. The usual answer to these kinds of issues is that the creature has no natural predators, but it’s different in this case: they’ve survived because they’re fun. New scientist put it like this: “‘It’s odd to think this breed survived as a pet because people made fun of it,’ says Carol Beck of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, whose team found the gene behind the muscle defect” (These goats may have even made it as “mutant of the month” in Nature Genetics, but I can’t check because I don’t have a subscription.) So there we go: they’re mutants that are fun to have around. Case closed.

I’ve just booked us tickets to see Stomp in Brighton in October. I booked the tickets online, and it took me 4 attempts to buy the damn things… and then they charged me £1.50 for booking over their “easy internet booking”. Worst online purchasing for a LONG time… Bah!

If you need to know things about the world, such as the countries with most cardinals, or the richest countries, or … well there are quite a few things you might want to know… then have a look at Aneki. It’s a festering cesspool of advertising, but the information is there.

Congratulations Suran!