One of these gas energy savers recently came into my possession, and I have to say - don't bother getting one. I tested mine using the Awesome Power of Science(tm) and can confirm that using it makes water take a repeatable 33% longer to boil. Stick to sensible kitchen gadgets, like the apple peeler/slicer/corer.

Edit: Oh, and if it really catalysed unburned gas, then surely it could keep itself hot when previously heated and then placed on top of an unignited but hissing gas ring?

So, I finally got sufficiently annoyed by Ocado arbitrarily deciding to stop me choosing whether or not to store the password for their website to write a trivial Greasemonkey script to enable the functionality again. You can get it here, if you would find it useful.

( code also under cut )

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is a legendary figure in gastronomical literature; a cursory scan through my cookery shelf sees him cited by Harold McGee, Hervé This and Jeffrey Steingarten, to name the first three that came to hand. An English translation of his masterwork, "The Physiology of Taste" is still in print. I was given a copy for my birthday, and I have written a few thoughts about it ( here )

To summarise, I think any foodie with an appreciation of history would enjoy the book, particularly one who is enthusiastic about the current fashion for more scientific cooking, and wants to see where it all started.

So, it seems to be universally agreed that the 0.75% base rate cut announced today by the US Federal Reserve Bank was an attempt to stop global stock markets from continuing their recent sharp downward trend. It also seems to be agreed that the size of the cut is unusually large, and unusually timed, in that it didn't follow a regular meeting of their "Open Market Committee". My rudimentary understanding of economics leads me to believe that by making it less attractive to invest your money with the US government, investors will preferentially buy shares, increasing demand and hence prices.

So far, so good. But I found this article interesting. It seems to be agreed by those quoted in the article that cutting the base rate by 0.75% is very significant. There also seems to be agreement that the action is "risky". But what I don't understand is people asserting that the decision is evidence of "panic". Do those commentators actually believe that the committee made their decision in the throes of gut-wrenching terror? That the decision was not the result of rational decision-making nor of reasoned argument? Do they have inside information on the mental states of the committee members? If they don't have any evidence for their assertions, aren't they acting irresponsibly by baselessly contributing to the fall in investor confidence?

I think I have previously analogised bankers and traders to a troupe of monkeys encountering fire for the first time, egging each other closer and closer until one of them gets burned, whereupon they all run away screaming. This kind of negative commentary strikes me as being the equivalent of shouting "fire!" at the first imagined whiff of smoke - dangerous; unhelpful; irresponsible.

"The worker also said the pilot had told him all the electronics had also failed."

But the 777 uses fly-by-wire.

The full reasons for the crash will emerge in due course, no doubt.

I discovered the delightful inclusion of a "map" function ("ARRAYFORMULA") in Google Spreadsheets today. Those of you with experience programming in functional languages will appreciate the elegance of this, and of the other higher-order functions (HOFs), none of which have yet made it into the world of spreadsheets as far as I can determine, Google or otherwise.

terpsichore1980 (whose job requires her to be an Excel wizard) informs me that Microsoft have gone down the road of implementing custom functions for every combination of HOFs they think their users might need (eg COUNTIF, which is equivalent to FOLD(ADD(),(MAP(IF(condition, 1, 0)))) in some vaguely spreadsheety functional pseudocode, or ARRAYFORMULA(SUM(IF(rangecondition, 1, 0))) in Googlese.

Anyway, it made me happy, and I thought I'd share it.

"For that reason, net neutrality is a pipe-dream. We believe it is vital to put the customer in control of what takes priority on their line and we're already developing that capability," he said.

No, you're developing the capability to impose arbitrary restrictions on the way people access the Internet. Giving people the option of paying you more money to stop is not "putting them in control".

Any fans out there of theories of everything?

I've never been good enough at HEP theory to do more than skim this stuff, but I particularly liked the end of section 5: "The theory has no free parameters. The coupling constants are unified at high energy, and the cosmological constant and masses arise from the vacuum expectation values of the various Higgs fields..." - the guy is simply reeling off desirable features from the GUT ticklist.

I eagerly await the results of some peer review, and about a decade of LHC running. :-)

I join you fresh from the celebration of rjw1's birthday. Any Circle Line pub crawl is inevitably something of a bacchanalian excess, but rjw1 is the first person I know of to have completed it on pints. I am moved to assert that, when a man's first action after quaffing his 27th pint of beer is to call for a 28th, the only honourable response is to buy him it.

Your narrator has reached the vast dominion of Canadia, and is contemplating upon Quebec.

( In which it is explained how much the French Canadians prefer being British, and who the United Empire Loyalists were. Including one-sided accounts of various significant events in North American history. )