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Britons want to work more?

18-May-13

So, the FT has an article which claims that “Britons want to work more”. Evidence for this it cites data which shows that since 2008 the number of people who would work more hours if they were available has moved significantly ahead of the number of people who think they are working too many hours. To me, the obvious explaination for this is that since 2008 we have seen a fall in real wages for most people at the same time as an increase in unemployment, a significant increase in rental costs, and real-terms cuts to several benefits.

Seems to me the evidence doesn’t say that people “want” to work more – it says they are being bloody forced to work more.

Curried Squash and Red Lentil soup

25-Mar-12

http://www.cookingcurmudgeon.com/2011/10/curried-squash-and-red-lentil-bisque.html

Rye and Semolina Pizza

13-Dec-11

First attempt at a rye pizza. Probably needed to be 65% hydration rather than 60%.

Ingredients

  • 300g rank-hovis as you like it
  • 80g doves Farm Organic 00 flour
  • 60g fine semolina
  • 60g rye flour
  • 300ml water
  • 7g fast action yeast
  • 1tsp salt
  • 1tsp olive oil

Method

Autolyse

Mix 300g white flour with 300ml warm water. Leave it for 20mins.

Dough

Mix yeast into autolyse mixture. Mix semolina, 00 flour, rye, salt and oil. Mix salted flour into autolyse mixture. Kneed for 5 minutes (maybe less).

Rise for 60-90 minutes until doubled.

Split into 4 then rest for 20 minutes.

Cooking

Heat oven to maximum. Put cast iron griddle under the grill (broiler). Just before starting to cook, turn grill up to maximum.

Shape dough. Add toppings. Cook directly on griddle under the grill for 5 minutes.

Humus

26-Nov-11

You need to make the Tahini and then use a bit of it to make the humus and store the rest of the Tahini in a clean jar in the fridge.

Tahini

Ingredients

4:1 sesame seeds:olive oil by volume

I typically use 200ml of seeds to 50ml of oil, it is difficult to blend less.

Method

  1. toast seeds on tray at 170C for 15 minutes. Turn seeds every 5 minutes to prevent burning
  2. blend seeds + half oil until starts to form paste
  3. add remaining oil, blend to fine paste. depending on the machine this can take a long time and much scraping down of the blender. Worth it though, as this makes enough for quite a bit of humus

Humus

Ingredients

  • 1 juice of lemon
  • 1 scotch bonnet pepper
  • 4 garlic segments
  • 3tsp tahini
  • 1/2tsp Salt
  • 60ml water
  • 250g cooked chickpeas

Method

  1. blend garlic and scotch bonnet
  2. add and blend chickpeas
  3. add rest of ingredients
  4. blend, taste, adjust seasoning

No Knead Pizza Dough – Metric Conversion

19-Nov-11
  • 380g flour
  • 360ml water
  • 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
  • 3/2 teaspoon salt

Optional (add both or neither otherwise you will over-rise or under-rise the dough):

  • 60ml olive oil
  • 1 tsp sugar

Directions:

  1. Mix the flour with the yeast and salt + water. Cover with plastic wrap and rest for 18hours.
  2. On a lightly floured surface, lightly sprinkle the dough with flour. Fold once or twice, cover loosely with plastic wrap. Rest for 15 minutes.
  3. Divide into 4 balls. Cover and rise for 2 hours.
  4. Stretch into desired shape, top, cook hot.

Texas Flour Tortillas – Metric Conversion

26-Oct-11

This is a metric conversion of my favorite flour tortilla recipe

Ingredients

  • 250g of of all-purpose flour
    • can make them whole wheat by substituting half whole-wheat flour for white flour
  • 18g (1 1/2 teaspoons) of baking powder
  • 18g (1 teaspoon) of salt
  • 12ml/4.5g (2 teaspoons) of vegetable oil
  • 175ml/180g of warm milk

Method

  1. Mix flour, baking powder, salt and oil
  2. Add the warm milk
  3. Stir until a loose, sticky ball is formed
  4. Knead for 2 minutes. Dough should be firm and soft
  5. Rest dough covered in a bowl for 20 minutes
  6. Split into 8, hand roll them into balls
  7. Rest balls covered on a plate for 10 minutes
  8. Place dough ball on floured surface, pat into a 10cm diameter circle
  9. Roll with a pin from the center until thin and 20cm diameter
  10. Don’t over work the dough, it must remain soft
  11. Cover rolled out tortilla. Repeat for each dough ball
  12. In a dry iron skillet (or similar) heated on high, cook the tortilla about 30 seconds on each side. It should start to puff up a bit when done

how many tournaments do you have to play before you get heads up with any other given player

21-Aug-11

The number of ways to choose r elements from a set of n elements is given by the Binomial Coefficient formula:

n!/(r!(n-r)!)

So, for example, if we have a tournament with 10 players starting, the calculation for the number of possible pairs of players that could get heads up is:

10!/(2!8!)
3628800/(2 * 40320)
3628800/80640
45

So there are 45 possible pairs of players. If we assume that each player has an equal probability of being first, and each player has an equal probability of being second then we can calculate the probably of any given pair of players getting heads up.

p = 1/45 = 0.0222

We can also calculate how many tournaments on average we would expect to have to play before a given pair gets heads up:

1/p = 45

The probability of any 2 given players not getting heads up in a tournament is

1-(1/45) = 44/45

The probability of 2 players having not got heads up after t tournaments is:

(1-p)^t

Probability table for the probability of not having got heads up after a given number of tournaments (assuming random distribution):

Trials  Prob Not HU     Prob HU 
1	0.9777777778	0.0222222222
2	0.9560493827	0.0439506173
3	0.9348038409	0.0651961591
4	0.9140304222	0.0859695778
5	0.893718635	0.106281365
6	0.8738582209	0.1261417791
7	0.8544391493	0.1455608507
8	0.8354516127	0.1645483873
9	0.8168860213	0.1831139787
10	0.7987329986	0.2012670014
11	0.7809833764	0.2190166236
12	0.7636281903	0.2363718097
13	0.7466586749	0.2533413251
14	0.7300662599	0.2699337401
15	0.7138425653	0.2861574347
16	0.6979793971	0.3020206029
17	0.6824687439	0.3175312561
18	0.6673027718	0.3326972282
19	0.6524738213	0.3475261787
20	0.6379744031	0.3620255969
21	0.6237971941	0.3762028059
22	0.6099350342	0.3900649658
23	0.5963809224	0.4036190776
24	0.583128013	0.416871987
25	0.5701696127	0.4298303873
26	0.5574991768	0.4425008232
27	0.5451103063	0.4548896937
28	0.5329967439	0.4670032561
29	0.5211523718	0.4788476282
30	0.509571208	0.490428792
31	0.4982474034	0.5017525966
32	0.4871752388	0.5128247612
33	0.4763491224	0.5236508776
34	0.4657635864	0.5342364136
35	0.4554132845	0.5445867155
36	0.4452929892	0.5547070108
37	0.4353975895	0.5646024105
38	0.4257220875	0.5742779125
39	0.4162615967	0.5837384033
40	0.407011339	0.592988661
41	0.3979666425	0.6020333575
42	0.3891229394	0.6108770606
43	0.3804757629	0.6195242371
44	0.372020746	0.627979254
45	0.3637536183	0.6362463817
46	0.3556702046	0.6443297954
47	0.3477664222	0.6522335778
48	0.3400382795	0.6599617205
49	0.3324818733	0.6675181267
50	0.3250933872	0.6749066128
51	0.3178690897	0.6821309103
52	0.3108053322	0.6891946678
53	0.303898547	0.696101453
54	0.297145246	0.702854754
55	0.2905420183	0.7094579817
56	0.284085529	0.715914471
57	0.2777725172	0.7222274828
58	0.2715997946	0.7284002054
59	0.2655642436	0.7344357564
60	0.259662816	0.740337184
61	0.2538925312	0.7461074688
62	0.248250475	0.751749525
63	0.2427337977	0.7572662023
64	0.2373397133	0.7626602867
65	0.2320654975	0.7679345025
66	0.2269084864	0.7730915136
67	0.2218660756	0.7781339244
68	0.2169357184	0.7830642816
69	0.2121149246	0.7878850754
70	0.2074012597	0.7925987403
71	0.2027923428	0.7972076572
72	0.1982858463	0.8017141537
73	0.1938794941	0.8061205059
74	0.1895710609	0.8104289391
75	0.1853583707	0.8146416293
76	0.1812392958	0.8187607042
77	0.1772117559	0.8227882441
78	0.1732737169	0.8267262831
79	0.1694231898	0.8305768102
80	0.16565823	0.83434177
81	0.161976936	0.838023064
82	0.1583774486	0.8416225514
83	0.1548579497	0.8451420503
84	0.1514166619	0.8485833381
85	0.1480518472	0.8519481528
86	0.1447618062	0.8552381938
87	0.1415448772	0.8584551228
88	0.1383994354	0.8616005646
89	0.1353238924	0.8646761076
90	0.1323166948	0.8676833052
91	0.1293763238	0.8706236762
92	0.1265012944	0.8734987056
93	0.1236901545	0.8763098455
94	0.1209414844	0.8790585156
95	0.1182538959	0.8817461041
96	0.1156260315	0.8843739685
97	0.1130565642	0.8869434358
98	0.1105441961	0.8894558039
99	0.1080876584	0.8919123416
100	0.1056857104	0.8943142896
101	0.1033371391	0.8966628609
102	0.1010407582	0.8989592418
103	0.098795408	0.901204592
104	0.0965999545	0.9034000455
105	0.0944532889	0.9055467111
106	0.0923543269	0.9076456731
107	0.0903020085	0.9096979915
108	0.0882952972	0.9117047028
109	0.0863331795	0.9136668205
110	0.0844146644	0.9155853356
111	0.082538783	0.917461217
112	0.0807045878	0.9192954122
113	0.0789111525	0.9210888475
114	0.0771575713	0.9228424287
115	0.0754429586	0.9245570414
116	0.0737664484	0.9262335516
117	0.072127194	0.927872806
118	0.0705243675	0.9294756325
119	0.0689571593	0.9310428407
120	0.067424778	0.932575222
121	0.0659264496	0.9340735504
122	0.0644614174	0.9355385826
123	0.0630289415	0.9369710585
124	0.0616282983	0.9383717017
125	0.0602587806	0.9397412194
126	0.0589196966	0.9410803034
127	0.05761037	0.94238963
128	0.0563301395	0.9436698605
129	0.0550783587	0.9449216413
130	0.0538543951	0.9461456049
131	0.0526576308	0.9473423692
132	0.0514874612	0.9485125388
133	0.0503432954	0.9496567046
134	0.0492245555	0.9507754445
135	0.0481306765	0.9518693235
136	0.0470611059	0.9529388941
137	0.0460153036	0.9539846964
138	0.0449927413	0.9550072587
139	0.0439929026	0.9560070974
140	0.0430152825	0.9569847175
141	0.0420593873	0.9579406127
142	0.0411247343	0.9588752657
143	0.0402108513	0.9597891487
144	0.0393172768	0.9606827232
145	0.0384435596	0.9615564404
146	0.0375892582	0.9624107418
147	0.0367539414	0.9632460586
148	0.0359371871	0.9640628129
149	0.035138583	0.964861417
150	0.0343577256	0.9656422744

Riot

18-Aug-11

These riots were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian. These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament. And these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this. No, this was about behaviour… …people showing indifference to right and wrong… people with a twisted moral code… people with a complete absence of self-restraint. – David Cameron (15 August 2011)

These sentences were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian. These sentences were not about government cuts: there is plenty of money to jail people for robbing high street stores and throwing stones at riot police, just not for Youth Centers in Haringey. But these sentences were all about poverty: they are insults to the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like those MPs who fiddled their generous expenses and those bankers that bet against the same collateralized debt obligations that they were selling. No, these sentences were about behaviour… magistrates showing indifference to right and wrong… judges with a twisted moral code… a legal system with a complete absence of self-restraint.

But above all, these sentences are because riots can turn into mass revolt which can inhibit and occasionally bring down governments. And governments do not like to be bought down.

  • Anderson Fernandes, 22, was warned by a judge at Manchester Magistrates’ Court that he may face jail after he admitted stealing two scoops of ice cream. He will be sentenced next week.
  • Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, was jailed for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of water from Lidl supermarket
  • Mother-of-two Ursula Nevin, from Manchester, was jailed for five months for receiving a pair of shorts given to her after they had been looted from a city centre store.
  • Beswick, of Anson Street, Eccles, who the court heard had been given a 37in television to put in his car, was jailed for 18 months for
    handling stolen goods
  • Carter, of James Street, Salford, was caught in King Street, Manchester, with a bag of clothes and shoes worth £500. He was sentenced to 16 months in jail for theft by finding.
  • Ashraf Hussain: Ashraf, 30, received a four year sentence for riot after the court saw video evidence of him throwing two or three stones.
  • Alam Zeb Khan: Alam, 27, received a three year sentence for riot – there was no evidence of him throwing stones but he was described by police as a ‘ringleader’ because he was seen shouting at rioters.
  • Asam Latif: Asam, 33, received a sentence of four years and nine months for riot – he threw six stones at police.
  • Mudasar Khan: Mudasar, 21, Received a one year sentence for violent disorder because he was filmed throwing a stone.
  • Mohammed Ali Zaman: Mohammed, 26, received a sentence of two-and-a-half years for riot after being filmed throwing two or three stones at the police.
  • Mohammed Arif: Mohammed, 26, has been sentenced to five years and three months for riot.
  • Christopher Ullah: Christopher, who is mixed race and 19, was convicted of involvement in the Ravenscliffe Estate disturbances. The events there were not officially classified as a ‘riot’ and so those involved have received much lower sentences than those convicted of involvement in the Manningham riot. Christopher received a sentence of 18 months at a young offenders’ institute.
  • The youngest suspects bought before the courts last week in connection with the riots were an 11-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy.
  • Wilson Unses Garcia, 42, of Walworth, south London. He was jailed for six months for receiving stolen property: two tennis racquets worth £340 looted from a sports shop in south London.
  • Two men have been sentenced to four years in jail for using Facebook to incite riots and civil unrest in England. The men, 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw from Marston and 22-year-old Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan from Warrington, were arrested last week after days of riots spread across London.
  • One of the men sentenced to nine months in jail was 19-year-old Adam Rowley, from Woking in Surrey. The Old Bailey heard that he ripped off the blue lamp from a fire brigade vehicle as it raced to the rescue of a woman whose leg had been crushed under a police van. During the Stop the City anti-capitalism riot on 18 June, Rowley was also seen confronting police lines, about to throw a rock. He was later seen with a stick in his hand and carrying a door used in a barricade. Rowley admitted violent disorder and theft.
  • Nicholas Pyne, 26, from Guildford, Surrey, was also jailed for nine months after he admitted violent disorder. Pyne was filmed as mounted police tried to disperse demonstrators. The court heard that he was seen throwing a can of beer at an officer, and later at the head of a horse whose woman police officer rider was pulled off by others.
  • The third man, Steven McNally, 19, a drama student from Woking, Surrey, received 150 hours’ community service after also admitting violent disorder. The Common Serjeant of London, Judge Neil Denison, said McNally had been on the fringes of the violence, rather than a ringleader, and was drunk.
  • The indictment charged the men with having formed part of a riotous mob at a Glencraig on 22nd November last, and, acting with common purpose, assaulted police officers and miners who had returned to work by throwing stones at them, and striking several of them with their fists; broke windows at Glencraig Colliery, set the engine in motion and caused the cage to be raised above its proper stopping place, and damaged the winding gear; and threw stones at and broke the windows of a house occupied by a police pensioner. Sentences appalled imposed on the convicted men wear as follows: – 12 months imprisonment – James Holland, Lochore, and George Armstrong, Crosshill. 9 months – Thomas Malcolm and Peter Aird, South Glencraig, and James Ogle, Crosshill. 8 months – Michael Cooney, Joseph Wilkinson Stewart, Charles Marcinkowitch (Mitchell), James Moffatt, Donald Shoolbread Fraser, South Glencraig; John Hunter, Crosshill; Robert Fleming, James Keicher, and Augustus Keicher, South Glencraig; William Maguire and William Menzies, North Glencraig. [Scotsman 7 April 1927]
  • A total of 11,000miners were arrested; 7,000 injured and eleven people died during the strikes
  • James Anderton, who spent most of his time as Greater Manchester’s chief feuding with his far left police committee. In March 1984, he said of the strict curfews and patrolling of the pit villages, “It appears that the police have imposed a curfew on the community as a whole, not just on the miners, and also that they have restricted free movement. These are things we normally associate with countries behind the iron curtain. The police are getting the image of a heavy handed mob stopping people going about their lawful duties” The Great Strike,Alex Callinicos and Mike Simmons, 1985) http://www.polfed.org/08_Police_Mar09_feature_policing_by_consent.pdf

(note some of the above are people sentenced after previous periods of rioting in the UK and some from the most recent incidents)

Oppenheimer and Einstein

09-Sep-09

Somebody set us up the bomb.

Snaggle Board

27-Nov-08

Snaggle Board is a betting game which I believe was invented by Adrian Dracup. It works like this:

  1. All players make a bet
  2. The dealer shuffles a 52 card deck
  3. The dealer deals out all the cards in a line, one at a time

If any consecutive 5 cards in the deck make a straight or better poker hand, then the dealer pays out an amount to each player equal to double the amount they staked. Otherwise the dealer takes all the money.

What are the odds of the players winning in this game?

The odds against getting a straight or better in any random 5 card hand are 131:1 (or 1/132)

The snaggle board constitutes 48 random 5 card hands (you could choose to examine each set of 5 consecutive cards in any order, so the odds of any of them being a straight or better is not effected by the order you examine them in). So answering the question is equivalent to the finding of the 1 – the probably that all 48 hands are worse than a straight

p(players wins) = 1 - p(all 48 hands worse than a straight)

The probability that a hand is worse than a straight is

p(hand worse than straight) = 1 - 1/132 = 131/132

The probability that a sequence of 48 hands are all worse that a straight is

p(48 hands worse than a straight) = (131/132)^48
p(48 hands worse than a straight) = 0.694

Therefore the probability that the players will win is

p(players wins) = 1 - p(48 hands worse than a straight)
p(players wins) = 1 - 0.694 = 0.306

So there is approximately a 30% chance that the players will win, and a 70% chance that the dealer will win.

Easy money!

correction: the dealer pays out double the stake, not equal to the stake as previously stated