Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Andrew Gray's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, July 9th, 2009
11:54 am	for fuck's sake So, Vodafone offer an international-roaming system called "Passport"; it's opt-in, it's advertised to all of their customers, and it seems quite a good idea. I went to set it up, yesterday. I'd heard nothing from them, so I called them today. Their terms and conditions: "Vodafone Passport is available to customers on all Your Plan, Anytime, Anynet, Smartstep, Smartplus and Simply price plans and all Business price plans" The person on the phone: "Oh, it's not available on old price plans, like yours. Yours was registered in 2007. Yes, yours is an Anytime price plan. That doesn't count. Yes, we were offering Passport to you in 2007. No, that doesn't mean anything." I am... not best pleased with these people. Am I missing something here, or does this just not make sense? ETA: well, I thought, I'll give them a second call. 50 minutes later: yes, they seem entirely unconcerned by words like "misleading" and "deceptive" floating around no, they don't seem to believe the published terms and conditions signify anything at all they are willing to try and buy me off with a very generous new contract, but strangely this vanishes when I actually talk to the sales department. I think I may well consider someone new when I get back. Mendacious bastards. Any recommendations? The one thing I actually use from Vodafone is the "stop the clock" package; other than that, I apparently use about fifteen minutes of daytime calls a month... (15 Comments |Comment on this)
1:25 am	Booklog Clearing up before I leave. The Clan Corporate. Charles Stross: published Tor, 2006. ( ...notes... ) Otherwise, in the past three weeks: Them: Adventures with Extremists - Jon Ronson Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton The Sacred Art of Stealing - Christopher Brookmyre Rumpole and the Primrose Path - John Mortimer Five books (and one more unfinished) in three weeks, not a single of them of any weight except the one I still haven't completed. I think I may be showing a bit of overwork, there. (Comment on this)
12:55 am	Things I have completely forgotten to mention, no. 78 This time tomorrow, I will be clearing Harwich on my way to Amsterdam for a few days. I have never been to the Netherlands before, at least not in a sense that doesn't include the phrase "and change at Schiphol". So: Internet! Please tell me things I should do! Things I should see! Things I should utilise any other verb in relation to! (Also: night ferries are great. I don't have to leave home until about 4pm tomorrow, and I get to stop off and have a leisurely dinner in London.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
10:16 pm	Mapumental So, I've spent some time over the last week playing with Mapumental, a more developed version of these travel-time maps which mySociety produced in 2007; they've a blog post about the new site here. ( ...some thoughts... ) I really do look forward to seeing where this goes next. It's a great toy, and potentially really useful for helping make quite complex decisions. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
1:19 am	European election notes, VI: detailed graphs So, since last time, I've tracked down voting figures on a local-authority level for all of England, which is a great help. Unfortunately, the data seems a bit corrupt; the totals for five of the eleven authorities don't quite add up, so I'm going to dig through those a bit more to see what's going on. On the other hand, this does mean we have data for half the country at a fairly local level, so let's see what interesting stuff we can spot so far. ( ...graphs... ) So, thoughts on interpretation, or suggestions for what else to feed into the data? I'm particularly intrigued by that last one, which doesn't look at all like what I expected. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
11:58 pm	Booklog: another miscellany A bit slower this past couple of weeks. The White House mess. Christopher Buckley, 1990: published Allison & Busby, 2004. ( ...notes... ) Falling free. Lois McMaster Bujold, 1988: published Baen, 1999. ( ...notes... ) Otherwise, in the past two weeks: A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away - Christopher Brookmyre The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll Common Sense [with: Agrarian Justice] - Thomas Paine Bad Science - Ben Goldacre Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present and Future - Jason Epstein Hammer And Tickle: A History Of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes - Ben Lewis Bad Monkeys - Matt Ruff (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
9:30 pm	European election notes, V: graphs! So, we've had various theories put forward as to why the BNP do better in one area than another. Let's try comparing some demographic variables against their vote share. ( ...here be graphs... ) Of course, we have two major problems here. First, my data is pretty elderly; "place of birth" is 2007, but ethnicity and employment figures date to the 2001 census. (I really must redo the latter with new data, though I suspect systemic differences will remain the same) Secondly, it's really blocky - I only can look at the macroscopic level of individual regions, eleven areas with about five million people apiece in them, and we often have to discard one of them as being an outlier. If anyone has any idea where I can get hold of voting results on a local-authority level, or something similar, I could come up with some much more indicative results. Any other variables that might be interesting to compare? loneraven suggests population age distribution, though I'm not immediately sure what to expect from that. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
11:46 pm	European election notes, IV So, the BNP. Let's drill down to what we all have hanging at the backs of our minds. I've poked around a bit with the BNP voting figures, and there's nothing desperately leaping out at me. I did eventually try using only the voting figures for England (the BNP in Scotland and Wales is a strange beast, and skews things a bit), and comparing the BNP's vote share in any given region to their national vote share. At first glance, this doesn't tell us anything interesting - they're much stronger in the Midlands and the North; this year, a voter in Yorkshire was 50% more likely to vote for the BNP than the national average, and one in Cornwall 40% less likely. But, year on year, the most intriguing region is London. The BNP took 18,000 votes in London in 1999, 76,000 in 2004, and 86,000 in 2009. This seems at first glance like an inexorable increase from a very small amount, but it turns out that in 1999, a London voter was about a third more likely to cast a BNP vote than the national average. In 2004, they were about a quarter less likely, and that remained the same this year. The South-West had much the same trajectory; in 1999 a voter was 20% less likely than average to vote BNP, but is now 40% less likely. The converse happened in the North-East, which went from 25% less likely 1999 to 35% more likely in 2009, and Yorkshire/Humber, which leapt from average in 1999 to 50% more likely in 2004, and remained there. Again, I've no explanation for these. But there ought to be something worth looking at here - why did the BNP not pick up votes in London in the same way it did elsewhere? Can we figure that out, and replicate it? (13 Comments |Comment on this)
10:42 pm	European election notes, III Churning through the regional figures continues deathly dull, but here's a detail in the national figures that leapt out at me. We've talked about the absolute changes in votes, and the relative changes in votes - ie, the absolute changes in vote share. It's interesting to look at the relative change in vote share - after all, picking up an extra one percent of the total vote is nice if you've already got 50%, but it's truly remarkable if you only had 1% to begin with, since you've doubled your share! This approach has the advantage of weighting for the size of the party, so we can tell how well they did on their own terms. So, using this method of looking at the results, what happened in the 2009 election? ( ...well... ) I invite people to draw conclusions from those numbers... because I'm not sure I can, beyond "it'll be interesting to see what happens to the English Democrats next time out". (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
8:25 pm	Thought for the day From the News Quiz: "So, how have the Lib Dems not gained ground on the back of all this?" "It's a skill, and we're very proud of it." Truer words never spoken, I fear. (I have a spreadsheet open as I talk. More spurious numbers will follow, honest.) (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
11:58 am	It must be a quiet morning The BBC, bless them, introduces us to the new Defence Minister with... an article on Famous Labour Party Moustaches of the Past. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
1:42 pm	European election numbers, part II So, a little more numbercrunching; more to follow later. Lets divide the parties into three not-quite-arbitrary groups. Firstly, there's the major parties - the ones people tend to think of as "the real parties", Conservative, Labour, & the Liberal Democrats. Then, there's the mid-rank parties (UKIP, Green, BNP, SNP, Plaid) - these have all at least had seats somewhere, and in some cases such as UKIP or the SNP are major powers in their own small niches. Lastly, the minor parties, everyone else. The outstanding oddity is Respect, who got a quarter of a million votes in 2004 - more than the SNP! - and then vanished; we'll call them mid-rank. UKIP, whilst steadily growing in stature in the European elections, are still really a mid-rank party. Finally, to be tidy, I've combined the "main" and Scottish Green Parties in both elections, and lumped the various Christian Party factions together. The three majors all lost votes, in absolute terms. The Conservatives managed an increase in vote share, a couple of percentage points, but dropped 200,000 votes; Labour lost six points and 1,350,000 votes; the Liberals lost half a point and 350,000 votes. Oddly, this is pretty much the same as the reduction in overall votes - 1,900,000 votes lost to the majors. The second-rank parties did pretty well. UKIP picked up a point but lost 150,000 votes; the Greens picked up two points and 190,000 votes; the BNP picked up a point and a half and 135,000 votes; the SNP picked up three-quarters of a point and 90,000 votes; Plaid kept the same share but dropped 35,000 votes. Respect basically ceased to exist, unsurprisingly. Net change for the group as a whole, in real terms: almost nothing. Note also the interesting correspondence between UKIP's vote reduction and the BNP's vote increase... "Protest votes", well. 1,250,000 in 2005, 1,280,000 in 2009. The distribution's changed wildly, though; before, you had one party at 0.75% (English Democrat), a couple around half a point (Liberal, Christian Vote), and dropping steadily from there. Now, there's four parties we'd class as protest votes with more than 1% of the electorate (English Democrat, Christian Party, Socialist Labour, NO2EU), and three more with about half a point each (Jury Team, UK First, Libertas). There's something faintly bizzare about that, isn't there? The top tier of parties lost a huge swathe of votes; the absolute numbers voting for the established third parties remained constant, and the absolute numbers voting for the "protest parties" remained constant. It's far too convenient and glib to be able to say "well, it was only mainstream-party voters who stayed home", but... well, it's seeming a more tempting inference. The increased bunching in the bottom tier is also interesting - are we seeing the nuclei of any new third parties here? Two further bits of research I want to do here - track this back and see what the "blocs" look like in the 1999 and 1994 elections; and compare the voting patterns of the regions between 2004 and 2009. Otherwise, any thoughts? I'm not arguing this is a desperately meaningful way of looking at things, but it's certainly interesting. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
12:11 am	Some intriguing numbers on the European elections My opinion on the BNP having seats in Europe should, well, not be much of a surprise. So let us take my anger and disappointment as read, omit the sharp language,* and skip to the bit where I get to use a spreadsheet.** A quick summary of the result: the big parties did badly, the small parties did well. Lots of people clearly cast protest votes against the major parties, who they percieve as hideously tainted! Or perhaps not exactly. Rolling the figures back further indicates that voting for "anyone but them" is ( ...a lot more common than we might assume... ) It seems that we're seeing not just a single surge of minor-party voting in response to the terrible scandals etc etc, but a trend which has been chugging along right since the start back in 1979, and which took off sometime in the mid-nineties. And, remarkably, it suggests that this year's collapse of the major-party vote is not nearly as drastic a drop as we might have anticipated... Any thoughts? I've a few more points to look at, which I'll see about posting tomorrow; if I can get the energy, it'd be interesting to see if the minor-parties vote in general elections tracks the European ones. * I can make a post with lots of rude words if you really want, but there's enough around already. ** The parts using the spreadsheet ended up being omitted from this post. But there was one! (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 5th, 2009
7:17 pm	An idle question... ...are there any major search engines which (deliberately or otherwise) index html comments? The reasons not to are obvious and legion, but that's never stopped someone making a silly decision. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
1:12 am	Booklog A snowball in hell. Christopher Brookmyre, 2008: published Abacus, 2009. ( ...notes... ) This week's list, otherwise, is implausibly long: The great crash : 1929 - J. K. Galbraith The pope's elephant - Silvio A. Bedini Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman Ecclesiastical history of the English people - The Venerable Bede* The Russian revolution : a very short introduction - S. A. Smith Anarchism : a very short introduction - Colin Ward A tenured professor - J. K. Galbraith Y: the descent of men - Steve Jones Thief of time - Terry Pratchett The complete McAuslan - George MacDonald Fraser Ingenious pursuits : building the scientific revolution - Lisa Jardine The fifth elephant - Terry Pratchett One fine day in the middle of the night - Christopher Brookmyre Bad monkeys - Matt Ruff * - this one has been on the back-burner for a while, but I finally finished it on Monday (Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
2:08 am	On a brighter note... ...the weather forecast for this weekend, touch wood, is clear and sunny and the good side of twenty degrees. Which makes it very tempting to haul the kayak out of the back garden and see if it still floats - would anyone be interested in coming along sometime on Saturday or Sunday? (Comment on this)
1:45 am	Booklog: Byzantium : the surprising life of a medieval empire Byzantium : the surprising life of a medieval empire. Judith Herrin, 2007: published Penguin, 2008. ( ...notes... ) Okay, so. This writing-things-about-books lark is not going as well as I had intended. For the sake of keeping a record, things read but not written about (since two weeks ago): Dare to be a Daniel : then and now - Tony Benn Quantum theory : a very short introduction - J.C. Polkinghorne Poststructuralism : a very short introduction - Catherine Belsey Emotion : a very short introduction - Dylan Evans Music : a very short introduction - Nicholas Cook. No, I don't know why I seem to only read books with colons in the title. Five others posted about, so ten over sixteen days, which is unexpectedly fast. (I read three and a half of them on the train in one day, though.) A nice long weekend looms, and a trip to the far barren West, which means plenty of time to catch up. It's pleasant to have solid free time, with no computer, ahead of me... (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 15th, 2009
12:43 am	Booklog: Lincoln's Dreams Lincoln's Dreams. Connie Willis, 1987: published Grafton, 1988. Oh, what to say about this book. I do love it, fairly uncritically. ( ...notes... ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
2:33 am	Booklog: The Storm The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means. Vincent Cable: published Atlantic, 2009. ( ...notes... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
10:34 pm	Today's radio delight Three Men on the Bummel, read by Hugh Laurie. Not as good on the whole as Three Men in a Boat, but the same style, and some of the individual scenes are marvellous. (I particularly like his discussion of How To Get Arrested In Germany). And, well, Hugh Laurie. Who better? Five fifteen-minute parts, so not too long at all. [iplayer link] (Comment on this)