No geek
is an island

Alex has spotted that there’s a red button preview currently running on Freeview channel 302, with clips from throughout the new series of Doctor Who.

My digital reception is rather poor at present (cable coming in two weeks!), so I’m delighted to see (thanks to Jim) that the whole marvellous clip is on the Freema Agyeman fansite. Beware minor spoilers, and prepare to be excited.

And in case you hadn’t noticed: David Tennant returns in Doctor Who this Saturday at 7pm on BBC One.

theguardian reports a well-meaning but bizarre suggestion that we could roll back the invasion of privacy that comes with CCTV by turning CCTV cameras into webcams.

Footage from surveillance cameras must be made freely available to the public if Britain is to avoid becoming a Big Brother state, researchers warned yesterday.

Under the proposals, networks of CCTV cameras would be turned into public webcams, allowing those under surveillance to see where cameras are directed, what images are recorded and who is viewing the footage.

In principle, the wider sharing of information is a good liberal principle, but this proposals doesn’t allow us to “watch the watchers” as the co-author of the report claims, only to watch each other. While I can see the argument that…

Community members could object if they felt particular cameras were unnecessary or unnecessarily intrusive. This would limit the potential for voyeuristic or prejudicial misuse of surveillance

…I’m not at all convinced it would happen. Rather, we would be introducing a system that allowed everyone to spy on everyone else, as intrusive but less regulated than the current systems.

Guess who said:

The 10p rate is very important because it’s a signal about the importance we attach about getting people into work and it’s of most importance to the low paid.

So prizes, as it’s Budget day, for working out that it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, back in 1999 - when he introduced the 10p starting rate of tax, replacing the previous lower rate of 20p.

Today he announced that he would be replacing the 10p rate with a 20p rate. How far we have come…

From the budget report, I’ve attempted to knock up a simple tax graph showing you who will be worse off and who better off under Gordon Brown’s new plans. He’s announced a cut of 2p in the basic rate of tax effective next April, but he’s also abolishing the starting 10% rate of tax, with no concomitant increase in personal thresholds announced. Here’s the basic effect - the blue line is the new tax regime as if applied today, the purple line is the current regime:


There are some caveats: Brown is making working tax credits more generous, so they will continue to a higher level, helping people on the lowest incomes (that’s my attempted interpretation anyway); and the top NI threshold will be raised, increasing slightly the NI paid by the richest.

The upshot, though, as far as I can see, is that if you earn in the £7k-£18k band, you’ll pay more tax despite this headline tax cut. The biggest beneficiaries appear, from the graph, to be those earning around £36k a year.

This is all rather back of the envelope so corrections welcome…

Update: Ryan’s worked out that £18,605 is the salary figure when you switch from loss to gain.

Thanks to the marvellous BBC programme catalogue prototype, you can - assuming you’re, er, not too old - see what was on TV on the day you were born, and even, if you know your time of birth, at the very moment you entered the world.

My mum was missing out on Sunday Worship: I, Where Are We Now? on BBC1 and an Open University programme on BBC2.

The link you need is in the format http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd where yyyy is the full year, mm is the month in two digits (e.g., 04 for April), and dd for the day.

From this we can see that the newly-thirtysomething Stephen Tall has the privilege of being born on the day the fourth episode of the fantastic Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang first aired, while today’s birthday boy Duncan had the pleasure of a budget reply party political broadcast from the SDP/Liberal Alliance featuring Roy Jenkins.

Only one of these TV programmes featured a giant rat. I leave you to guess which

Blogging, blogging, dieting, blogging, exercise, watching a soon to return BBC sci-fi series, beer, indie music, smiling, blogging, and cake.

Lots of interesting discussion in the office today about how to write good blog headlines (sparked by Copyblogger). Key tips (beyond the obvious “Don’t sound dull”) seem to include engaging the reader by phrasing the post title in the third person - “How you can lose weight!” rather than “Dieting guidelines from semi-professionals” - numerical lists, enticing secrect and questions.

Obviously it’s not quite as simple as that, and the tricks you use depend on what fits with the blog content, but how to construct post titles that draw the reader in is certainly something worth thinking about, at least in a “professional blogging” context. Readers can rest assured that this site, however, will continue to use tongue-in-cheek, humorous, or just plain lazy headlines.