drplokta

The Economist, who should know better, present as a problem here the statistics that 75% of deaths from non-communicable diseases, and 80% of premature deaths, occur in developing countries. But the population of the OECD countries plus Russia is only about 1.4 billion, so 80% of the world's population live in developing countries (unless they're using a radical new definition of "developing country" that excludes countries like Brazil, India and/or China), and thus the developing countries must be doing rather better than the developed countries as far as non-communicable diseases are concerned.

It's nearly as bad as the time the WHO set an objective to reduce the proportion of deaths due to non-communicable diseases. Which can of course also be expressed as setting an objective to increase the proportion of deaths caused by communicable diseases, violence, accidents or suicide. Since that's pretty much all the ways to die that there are, the two statements are equivalent to each other.

Re-reading Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold, and Miles Vorkosigan has just purchased as gifts ear-ring-sized replicas of a few planets, which are apparently "displayed under various levels of magnification, where they proved to be perfectly-mapped replicas of the worlds they represented, right down to the one-metre scale.” A quick calculation suggests that if they're 2cm across, then those one-metre scale objects are less than 2 nanometres across. Never mind "magnification", it would need a high-power electron microscope to see them, which it seems unlikely that the recipients of gifts will have available (although I suppose that in this case one of the recipients is the Emperor of Barrayar, and can presumably get as many electron microscopes as he wants).

So does the VATMOSS craziness mean that while I'm on one of my occasional tax-avoidance day-trips to buy cigarettes and wine in Belgium and France respectively, I can also pop over the border into Luxembourg, connect to a local wireless data network, and stock up on ebooks at 3% VAT instead of 20%? Even while still using my UK credit card and PayPal account? If not then why not -- it will be my right to pay the Luxembourg rate of VAT when buying ebooks in Luxembourg, and will be the retailer's duty to charge me that rate and no more. But if so then what's to stop me from getting an account with a Luxembourgeois VPN provider and doing the same without bothering to go to the effort of actually visiting Luxembourg?

It's high time that we had global agreement that electronic sales work like physical sales, with the regulations and tax rates of the country where the retailer is based applying to the sale, and with territorial rights based only on the retailer's location. Because in fact it's impossible to know where the customer is physically located at the time of the sale. Yes, this gives lots of oppurtunities for tax avoidance, which suggests that perhaps we should just give up trying to levy sales taxes on electronically delivered goods altogether, and replace them with taxes on things that can be unambiguously located geographically.

We took Jodie to the beach this afternoon, since it was nice and sunny, low tide, and after the closed season for dogs on (some of) the beach.

( Cut for a video, and big photos )

Thanks to my new iPhone 6, here's a slow-motion video of Jodie in action. Note the wildly flapping tongue and ears.

This is the best graph ever produced of first-time buyer mortgage affordability in the UK. The only thing lacking would be some indication of how the average first-time buyer mortgage compares to the average house price.

I have decided that any day where turning your horse out in the morning ends with you rolling around on the wet grass clutching your groin while the horse runs off into the field on his own is a bad day.

(Jonnie got a bit frisky and decided to jump in the air and kick his feet out in all directions. Luckily, he only caught me a glancing blow a few inches too high to be really painful.)

I've not added any more species for a while, so here goes. Subtracting one, because I see I've counted Green Woodpecker twice:

41. House Martin
42. Jay
43. Large White
44. Green-Veined White*
45. Common Blue
46. Wall (the butterfly, not the structure)
47. Speckled Wood
48. Meadow Brown
49. Common Toad
50. Common Lizard*
51. Yellowhammer*
52. Fox (took a surprisingly long time to see one of those)
53. Collared Dove*

Now that lots of people are revoking potentially compromised SSL certificates, it's quite important to check that your web browser is picking up certificate revocations. Try loading this URL: https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed

If you don't get a warning about the certificate being revoked or invalid, you should Google for your browser's name and "enable certificate revocation" and look for instructions on enabling it.

The "Heartbleed" SSL vunerability released last night (UK time) is a bad one, to the extent that I recommend being careful when accessing sensitive websites (webmail, online banking, etc.) for the next month or so, especially when you're on an untrusted network (e.g. someone else's wifi). If you know how, it's worth checking the SSL certificate details and being suspicious of any certificate issued before today's date.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/07/massive-security-bug-in-openssl-could-effect-a-huge-chunk-of-the-internet/?ncid=twittersocialshare

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/critical-crypto-bug-in-openssl-opens-two-thirds-of-the-web-to-eavesdropping/