Of course, having gone to the expense of the dry ice (almost £50 including £20 for Saturday delivery), we kept making more until we ran out.  Caramel was super, and Tia Maria (Kat’s invention) was just outstanding – we thought it was the best we could remember ever having.  Bacon and egg ice-cream was as odd a taste as when we had it at the Fat Duck restaurant – great, but odd.  Only what we thought would be a dead cert, of chocolate, was a bit meah – fine, but nothing special.

Of course, there were some errors along the way, most clear of which was to break the dry-ice into near powder, and add gently. Our first go had a rather larger load of dry ice, which ‘boiled over’ :-

Quite fun to look at, but it took quite a lot of cleaning up of sticky everything afterwards, and some effort to recover the icecream which was in iron hard lumps.  We abandoned using the baby ice-cream maker that we had been using for churning and used a large bowl, a wooden spoon and elbow grease.  A decent bowl mixer would have been easier, if of course we had one.  We also blitzed the ice cream in a blender when frozen, which made it really smooth.

We also had a go at using it in drinks.  The first stab was a little too enthusiastic to risk putting near your mouth

But, we managed to crack it so Sa could have a witch’s sherry

All in all, great fun.  And with great results, even if it is by far the most expensive ice-cream we’ve ever had!

Ingredients (for ~400g = enough for 4 people)

150g semi-skimmed milk
200g double cream
100g egg yolks (6 medium eggs)
1 tsp vanilla essence
30g caster sugar
3 g (1.5 leaves) leaf gelatin

Method

Put all the ingredients apart from the gelatin in the Thermomix, at 80 degrees Centigrade, speed 2, for 7 minutes (or use a saucepan and care not to heat it too hot).

5 minutes from the end, put the Gelatine sheets in cold water

Once finished, stir the gelatine sheets into the custard, put into container you want it to set in, and cool over ice before refrigerating.

Notes

A couple of weeks ago we made a custard with our Thermomix (our new highly indulgent kitchen toy).  Pretty much everything else we have done has been fab, and this wasn’t – the flavour wasn’t great, and the set wasn’t good either.  And, many recipes for custard have loads more sugar in than tastes good at the end (to us), so I decided to suss out a decent custard recipe, both for pouring and set.  This post is for me, to make notes as I go

Trial one

Based on Thermomix cookbook recipe, p 189.  50% recipe, asked for 3 large egg yolks; I used 4 smaller ones.  Note that the temperature is 80 degrees rather than the 90 degrees used for the original recipe that I didn’t like – less likely to over-cook the egg.

Tasted lovely when just done.  Trial on setting for 200 ml using 1.5 gelatine sheets.

Trial two

Based on Custard part of trifle recipe in Heston Bulmethal’s ‘Further adventures in search of perfection’, p 294.  Target temperature is 75 degrees.  Used 80 degrees (in choice between 70 and 80) as it worked pretty well in trial 1.  All ingredients added in one go (like trial 1).  Used 3 yolks (45g vs. 50g recipe quantity) vs. the 4 in trial 1. Used half fat milk rather than whole.  Used vanilla essence rather than saffron (same qty as trial 1).  Run at speed 2 to get slightly less air in.  Set was with 1g of gelatine sheet (half a sheet) – volume was also lower that trial one, and in fact this is still twice what was in Heston’s recipe (oops!).  But, good to try, as approx 50% of what was used in trial 1.

Hot it tasted not only creamier, but also sweeter.  Same amount of sugar was included, but liquid volume was only 150ml which probably explains it.  So, might be able to drop the sugar by 40% to match trial one.  There was less air in both the hot and set versions.  Much yellower colour than for trial 1.

Outcomes from trial 1 and 2

Trial 1 was better for non-set, whether hot or cold, and even guessing for the correction for sugar in trial 2.  But, needed less air, so speed 2 more appropriate.

Trial 2 was better for set, with a much creamier mouth feel and deeper yellow colour.  Only issue was that it hadn’t set enough after an hour – worth trying with slightly more gelatine, along with less sugar. That was true even allowing for the extent of setting,which was much too much for trial 1.

Trial 3,4

Same basis as trial 2, but only 60% of the sugar, and using the seeds from a vanilla pod rather than vanilla essence.  Used 75g of milk rather than 50g.  And, 150% (trial 3) and 200% (trial 4) of the gelatine.

Came out runnier (as you’d expect for slightly more milk).  But, only intended to be used as a set custard, so need to wait to assess.  As they went into the fridge, looking at trial 3, the vanilla seeds appear to have settled out somewhat – for trial 4 they are still well blended.

Outcomes from trial 3 and 4

In trial 3 the gelatine sheet hadn’t been properly melted – the result was lovely, but not set.  Trial 4 was firmly set, so splitting the difference, trial 3 should be the right amount of gelatine (if actually melted!).  Use of Vanilla seeds rather than vanilla essence didn’t really feel like it added much.  Sweetness was about right.

Mine was to guess that that there are 30 million workers in the UK, with the survey noting that half saying they charged their phone, so around £100 per person per year per charger.  At a guessed 10p for a marginal kWh of electricity, that is 20 kWh per week, 3 kWh/day, or over 100 Watts if used 24 hours a day.  At a guessed 10 watts for a charger, the figure is over 10 times too high, and probably more like 30 times too high (based on an 8 hour day).

So, what is the actual source of this fantastical (and wrong) number.  Well, it comes from a uSwitch press release (see here).  The explanation given is :-

When asked “Do you ever deliberately charge your phone or other gadgets at work to save on household bills?” 3.8% said “yes, all of the time”; 16.2% said “Yes, some of the time” meaning 20% said yes. 29.2% said “I charge my items at work, but not to save money”. This means that 49.2% of workers charge their phones or gadgets at work. When asked how much they save by charging gadgets at work the average amount was £9.18 a month, which equates to £110.16 a year. Based on ONS stats which show that there are 29.1 million people working in the UK (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/october-2011/index.html), this means that (0.492 x29.1) x 110.16 = £1.577 billion is spent charging gadgets each year.

So, the glaring point is that they just asked people how much they saved by charging their phone, and took the average of the responses.  Then, having asked for a figure that most people would be unlikely to know without effort (and who knows what the consumers responses really were), they didn’t even bother to do sanity check on it.  They just published.  And the Scotsman and Metro just used it, again without any sight of engaging their brains.

Of course, this was probably just a silly article many pages in, that may not have had the scrutiny it should … oh no, wait, the Scotsman did a leader on it as well!

The idea is simple – you eat at a breakfast bar that is part of a small kitchen that is used to try out new ideas.  But, the chance to chat to the chef throughout the meal makes it a much more engaging and educational experience.  In our case, the chef was Nanna Vestergaard who was absolutely excellent – interested, knowledgeable, inquisitive, chatty, as well as clearly being an excellent cook.  And the food was, unsurprisingly, outstanding (just like the last times we have eaten there).

We’ve come away with all sorts of ideas to try, for much of which we have the right kit (sous vide water bath and the like).  And, feeling that we should really really invest in a centrifuge, though maybe a little smaller than the 3 litre one they had.  Ok, maybe this is stretching the definition of ‘invest’ well beyond the normal meaning, but I WANT one!

Our previous best restaurant meal ever was  at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s three Michelin star restaurant.  The previous visits to Sat Bains were almost as enjoyable.  Almost.  This was as good – a different experience, but we loved it.  Anyway, if you have a chance, and you are anywhere near Nottingham, do try and book a visit to Sat Bains, and if you like to know how the food is made, go for the development kitchen.  Either way, it is SO much better than a normal meal out, even if you go to otherwise good restaurants.

We also took the chance to go horse riding,

rafting,

jumping ~6 metres into glacial rivers (not quite as cold as one might have expected),

down a lava tunnel,

saw where the American and Eurasian tectonic plates are being pulled apart,

and the moment that the Geyser started to blow …

… and just under a second later could feel the heat,

and relaxed in the blue lagoon

Overall though,the impression was off the power scale of active geology … it’s very hard to get a feeling for the sheer scale of things like lava flows until you realise that almost the whole of the 40 minute drive down road one from Reykjavik to the airport is across one lava field

Overall, a very enjoyable trip. We had to keep it to 5 nights as we were hosting a party for 20 of the family the day after we got back, but in fact that was just about perfect – enough time to see and do a lot, but without repeating things.

A word of advice, should you ever find yourself in Keflavik airport. Don’t rely on getting decent food there, and especially, avoid the Bistro Atlantic unless you want a serious disappointment, as well as the expected high prices.

Some more photos on Flickr, here.

The first book has a degree of character development, as well as the action.  So, even though it gets increasingly hard to suspend disbelief, the story arc feels interesting.  Enough to make you want to read the next at least.

But, like so many series, the principal attraction of the second and third is familiarity – taken on their own they aren’t worth bothering with.  And, it’s a marginal call for me if they are worthwhile even then.  There is virtually no character depth, with heros and villians signalled clearly within a paragraph of introduction, and then hammered home.  It’s the literary equivalent of video games that put a red halo round the bad guys, and a green one round the good.  I read on expecting some degree more character depth after the first book, but it never came.  And, since the second and third are really the same huge book in two pieces, you end up reading them both.

In summary, you might enjoy the first.  But, don’t expect it to build from there.

*The Girl with the Dragon tattoo, The Girl who played with fire, and The Girl who kicked the Hornets nest.

But, we simply couldn’t work out how the non-flying ducklings had arrived, or could therefore leave easily.  So, we found ourselves having to guide the duck and ducklings right across the garden, past the house, through the gate, down the road and path, all the way to the River Trent – maybe 400 metres, or in duckling terms, a long way.

But, it was good to see them all safely heading off into a safe pondlet on the side of the river; a bit of a feel-good task, even if we did spend a couple of hours.  And, our pond is back to the rather smaller occupants that it was built for.

But, I thought I might do some mental ju jitsu and use the frustration positively in prodding the arguments as examples of mental biases or dodgy thinking, whether that is in deliberate exploitation and spin (most of it I suspect), or people fooling themselves.  I should note that I didn’t really start writing this with a strongly held view on which system is better; I suspect that it is AV, but would really rather see some robust analysis, and thus far that is thin on the ground.  But, the dreadful standard of arguments put forward by the ‘no to AV’ group basically makes me more inclined to support AV … if this is their best argument then the case feels pretty weak.

You can fine the ‘No to AV’ website here, and the ‘Yes to AV’ site here.  To save you looking up the key propositions made, on the ‘No to change’ side we have declarations that AV is costly, complex and unfair, and a politician’s fix. The key arguments ranged on the pro side are that MPs working harder to earn – and keep – our support, you have a bigger say on who your local MP is, and that it tackles the ‘jobs for life’ culture.

As represented in their arguments, I have issues with pretty much all of them

How good is the ‘AV is costly’ argument?

It seems customary to start at the beginning, so I’ll start with the AV is costly argument.  This is quite special in that it is flawed at so many levels.  There is a backup document that explains their logic in detail – very welcome since this is all too often missed out, with arguments hanging in mid-air unsupported … but, as I write this I find that they have decided to remove the link to the detailed working from the web-site.  Now, why would anyone do that?  It’s not like it is any more work to leave it there!  Good job I kept a copy – you can see it here.  I’ll come to that shortly, but first it is fun to see which elements stand out in their summary, and then see if they are supported (red italics are mine, to highlight the areas of concern) :-

AV is costly
The change to AV will cost up to an additional £250 million. Local councils would have to waste money on costly electronic vote counting machines and expensive voter education campaigns. With ordinary families facing tough times can we really afford to spend a quarter of a billion pounds of taxpayers’ money bringing in a new voting system? Schools and hospitals, or the Alternative Vote – that’s the choice in this referendum.

First, lets look at the £250m, and the associated friend of all dodgy arguments ‘up to’.  It is well known that introducing a number acts as an anchor on thinking (see here).  That’s especially true if the there is one number surrounded by text, and/or is the only number.  This is why shops state a high price and a large reduction – it makes you think you got a real bargain, and it is mentally very hard to discard that ‘information’ – you end up starting there and making corrections to get what you perceive is the real value.  The addition of ‘up to’ immediately should alert you that this is not going to be the most likely number, it is going to be an estimate that includes pretty much everything.  It signals, if a signal was required, that this is likely to be a deliberate effort to influence your thinking via an anchoring bias, so you should be suspicious.

Then there is the second stand-out part of this argument summary ‘the choice’.  A deliberate aim to create and use an attentional bias in the form of clearly stating that this is a simple choice between based on the data presented.  Even by their own logic this is not true, since they have two more headline arguments. And, manifestly it can’t be true since it does not make any allowance for whether the voting is in fact materially more representative.  One might as well say that the whole of the democratic process is money that could be better spent on hospitals etc.

There are more things wrong with this cost argument even at this summary level, but it feels more fun to wade into the more detailed analysis, especially since the no to AV campaign saw fit to remove the link from their web site (reminder – I kept a copy, and you can find it here).

The £250m builds up from four components; first at £82m is the cost of the AV referendum, second at £9m is the cost of voter education ahead of the referendum, third at £90-£130m is the cost of automatic voting that is claimed to be necessary, and fourth at £26m is voter education with AV.  In total they come to £217-£247m.

Lets start with the first two.  They are, in short utterly irrelevant, since the costs are already sunk (a clear misuse of sunk cost biases – see here).  The decision on WHETHER to have a referendum is in the past, we are having one.  So, whether a change is sensible or not is irrelevant.  So, that takes the total down by £91m to £126 – £156m.

Now, lets take the biggy – the use of technology.  Two models are given for costs.  One gives a range of £76m – £101m, the other £108m.  Onto both is added VAT.  I am mystified about why.  This is government spending, so the tax comes back to the government.  It is a zero sum, so knocking 20% off at a stroke (more accurate to say that they wilfully inflated the cost by 20%).  No specific guidance is given for the robustness or otherwise of either estimate, so a reasonable start would be to use the average, or £98m.

The next question is what proportion of the costs are variable vs. fixed.  Extrapolating from some pilot schemes, and the Scottish example which has less than 10% of the UK electoral base with absolutely no allowance for fixed costs vs. variable costs seems ludicrous.  When scale goes up, the cost falls as the fixed costs get divided amongst a larger user base.  And the allowance for this .  Nada.  Zip.  Not even a mention that it might distort their figures.

But, it is far from obvious that automated counting is required.  It is definitely fair to say that opinions vary – some close to the situation regard it as essential, though Australia has managed for many years without.  But, there is some tortuous logic used.  The clearest attempt goes along the lines of ‘there are multiple different schemes used, so automated counting is the only practical way of doing the count’.  This is clearly bogus.  If you accept that there are other more complex schemes used at the same time, then the introduction of AV vs. FPTP is just a choice between schemes – neither is particularly harder than the other.  You might choose to introduce automated counting, but is it almost completely unlinked to the choice between FPTP and AV.  You might easily extend this and ask why, if there is a fairer system, all elections don’t use that and simplify things back to the point that manual voting can be used and save money?

There is a backup argument here that manual voting would take longer, and would be ‘incompatible with British electoral traditions’.  These would, presumably, be the same traditions that fought against secret ballots, and women voting?  I mean, really, when has ‘tradition’ been a serious argument for anything?  I don’t think that a few hours or days longer in counts would make a deal of difference to the world … and if it did, then we would have gone electronic a long time ago, and solved the current challenges it has.

I spent some years consulting.  If any of my teams had seriously proposed the analysis described here, even without the errors on VAT and taking the high figure not the mean, I would have sent them away to try again.  And, I would have been very suspicious of what they came back with the second time if they though the first was worthy of merit.  It is very very poor.  I’d also note that there is a paucity of analysis on the pro-AV side on whether these costs could be justified, which is unimpressive.  But, this effort is woeful.

Finally there is the cost of voter education. This is given as £25,917,712, based on the cost of the Vote Scotland 2007 campaign.  I have some issues with the methodology since once again it assumes that all costs are variable, and can be scaled simply, which doesn’t seem wholly defensible.  But, as a first approximation, since many of the costs will have been media spend or leafleting, it will do.  I would note that leaflets were found to be particularly effective, and leaflets do not cost 50p/unit.   But, I will try and avoid my own hostile media bias, and just accept it.  It is 50p per voter.  I think I can live with that as a cost.

So, what are we left with on the cost argument?  There might well be a cost of about £25m. About 10% of what was claimed, and though it seems a large number, when set against the UK total expenditure that Governments are responsible for it is minuscule.  It wouldn’t buy a Mars bar for each voter.  For something important.

——————

Right, this post is quite long enough, so I will stop here, and maybe return to the other arguments later.  I noted earlier that I didn’t have a strongly held view on the the choice between AV and first past the post.  On reflection, that is a little disingenuous.  It would be more accurate to say that whilst the quality of political positioning, commentary and discussion is of the quality shown in the ‘no to AV’ positioning, the actual voting mechanism seems like a second order issue at best.

A few others links of interest.  On the ‘for’ side, see here.  For the against side see this in telegraph (pretending to be impartial)

However, the second thing was the discovery of surface mount GU10 LED bulbs.  The LEDs in this case have no focussing plastic lens on top, as you can see in the photo to the right (each LED is one of the squares, with a yellow circle in the centre).  This has two consequences, both positive.  Firstly the light is much less focussed, so it lights evenly rather than in just one tiny spot below the fitting.  Secondly, the depth is reduced, meaning it fits in standard GU10 fittings without trouble.  You do have to be careful that the retaining ring doesn’t contact the exposed older contacts, but on the two I got (the other has smaller SMDs, and more of them) this was easy enough to do.  Even more surprising, these cost £4.50 including postage, from an ebay supplier, which is 1/4 of what similarly high power comparables cost.

So, I would now urge avoidance of all the existing LED lights, including the fancy (priced) ones, and definitely the CFLs that I used to like, and go for these.  Right now it appears you will need to go to ebay – other suppliers are still listing the same sorts of ones I had issues with before.