Donald Noble’s Site

George Monbiot has another fascinating, but rather frightening, piece on corporate tax avoidance, with these scary figures:

[Tax] avoidance now amounts to £25bn a year, evasion to £70bn, and outstanding debts to the tax service to £28bn: a total of more than £120bn. That’s roughly three-quarters of the budget deficit. It’s equivalent to 80% of the UK’s revenue from income tax. (Emphasis added

He goes into more depth than I could summarise here, so I urge you to read his article.

But of course, the coalition can blame it on Labour, who blamed it on the Tories before them, and so on ad infinitum. No wonder people are disenfranchised with politics.

I watched the fourth episode of the current series of Horizon last night on iPlayer — Is Seeing Believing? — the first one of this seris I have seen.

Horizon does seem to have improved back to it’s previous high standard, and was not dumbed down for TV as it was a couple of seasons ago. However, I still think the old credits were better, with the ————HorizOn———— graphic.

That aside, the programme was a fascinating look into what we know about our senses, and how this knowledge has improved in the past 10 years or so. I was aware of some of the content of the programme, but much of it was new and incredibly interesting:

Such as the fact that we use our sense of hearing to taste if crisps are fresh! If we hear a high frequency sound, we “taste” that they are crunchy.

There was also some incredible footage of a blind person cycling a bike, using echolocation to navigate around a park, in a similar manner to bats.

I will definitely be downloading the rest of the series as it becomes available, something to watch now the dark winter nights are here. (another being updating my blog…)

This news item¹ surfaced earlier in the week, and I still can’t get my head round it.

The Treasury has published a letter which confirms that cancelling one of two aircraft carriers would have cost hundreds of millions of pounds more than building both ships. BBC News

I thought I had a reasonable understanding of maths and business, but obviously not. It makes no sense at all how the cost of not building something as large and complex as an aircraft carrier can be greater than the cost of building it.

Penalty clauses for costs incurred up to the point of early cancellation of a contract are one thing, but I struggle to see how they can amount to more than £2.7bn, especially when the cost of construction is £2.6bn.

Another unsolved mystery of the word of banking and corporate finance.

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¹ I refuse to use the BBC’s terminology of a news “story”. The word story to me represents an article of fiction.

For those of you that may be interested in such things, this post goes into some of the software powering the site, and the styling of the content. If that doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip onto something else…

Textpattern

The content management system I have been using for the past few months since the refresh to power the site is Textpattern.

Textpattern is an elegant content management system that is free, open source software. It has a powerful, sophisticated engine that can be infinitely tuned to suit whatever type of web site you can imagine.

I hope to make more use of this, to customise further the display of each section, e.g. I have implemented a basic a categorised list of recipes on the main page of that section.

Textile

One of the benefits of Textpattern, is that it has support for Textile) built in. This allows for simple markup of the content, without having to resort to writing raw XHTML in your posts.

For example to get emphasised text _underscores_ are used, or * asterisks at the start of the line to give bulleted lists. See the Textile page for a full list and demo.

I know WordPress has a toolbar which allows you to insert the relevant markup, but I find it easier to keep typing, plus I can compose fully marked up posts on my phone, and the resulting markup from WYSIWHG web forms like Wordpress uses can be cluttered.

Site Styles

Those of you browsing in a modern standards compliant browser (Safari 4, Firefox 3, Chrome, or Opera 10 to an extent) will have effects like fancy gothic lettering, drop shadows, and semi-transparent layers of white and black to highlight the content. Some of these will work in Internet Explorer, but it does not fully support everything¹.

Alpha Transparency

It is remarkably easy to specify semi-transparent effects with CSS3 rgba() colours. Wherever you specify the colour, replace the normal color:#00FF00 hexadecimal codes with color:rgba(0,255,0,0.5) and specify an amount of transparency as the fourth parameter (50% in this case). Unfortunately, IE doesn’t support this as yet¹. This should also make changing the colour scheme much easier, as all the highlight tones change with the background image, instead of having to manually calculate complimentary colours.

Web-fonts & text-stroke

To spice up the headings, I’m using CSS @font-face to import a free blackletter style font. This can then be used, as you would any other font.

For the title, I have also used the text-stroke property (only implemented in Safari/Webkit). This allows for different outline and fill colours, as shown in the enlarged screenshot of the text. The relevant parts of the CSS are:

hgroup h1 {
 font: 3em IncisedBlackWideNormal, cursive;
 text-shadow:2px 3px 3px #420;
 -webkit-text-fill-color: #630;
 -webkit-text-stroke: 1px black;
 }

Drop-caps

The drop capitals at the start of each article are automatically applied using the CSS-selector .body > p:first-child:first-letter {} which matches the first letter, of the first paragraph (p:first child) where this is directly contained within an element with class .body (which I use to denote the main text of each article). The CSS used for the formatting is a little more complex, and I’ll not explain it in detail as it has been done ad infinitum elsewhere.

.body > p:first-child:first-letter {
 float:left;
 display:block;
 font: 2.2em IncisedBlackWideNormal;
 margin: 0 2pt 0 -2pt;
 padding: 0;
 line-height:0.8; }

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¹ I have reverted to using a semi-transparent image to provide a similar (but less elegant) effect for IE, as the site looked very plain otherwise.

When making soup, don’t discard the flavour in the peelings and skins — instead use them to make a vegetable stock. Simply put all the off-cuts, tops and tails, onion skins, peelings etc. in the pan and boil up with water whist you chop up the vegetables. Once this has simmered for 15 minutes or so, set aside the liquid and discard the boiled up skins. I tend to use a large pan with a colander sitting in it to collect the stock.

After rinsing the pan out, fry the onions (and leeks if using them) until starting to soften, then add the other vegetables and sauté for around 10 minutes, before adding the stock — making sure not to disturb any soil residue in the bottom (an added bonus of organic produce).

Season to taste, then simmer until cooked — perhaps half an hour. Then either leave chunky or blend as desired.

Simple really.