Google is odd sometimes. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I knew Christmas must be on the way because I saw Cheese Footballs in Somerfields. I tagged that post with “cheese footballs” which in WordPress (the blogging platform that makes this all work) creates a page for all posts with that tag. Nothing strange about that but I happened to take a look at the stats for this blog today and spotted that I’d had a number of visits to that very page from people who’d arrived there by searching Google for “cheese footballs”. If you go to Google right now and type in “cheese footballs”, that tag page comes up 9th in the search results! Google thinks that my blog post where I made a passing reference to those cheesy 80s party snacks is the ninth most important page about them on the internet.

The only conclusion I can draw from that is that in the Venn diagram of “things people talk about on the internet” and “cheese footballs”, the intersection of the two circles is pretty small and I’m in it. I now have a slight urge to try to become the first result on Google. This post should have helped.

For some more Venn diagram fun, head over to Indexed. It’s funnier than it sounds.

Most people are familiar with Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics but today I discovered he’s not the only science fiction writer creating laws in threes. Here are Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For more “laws”, some insightful, take a look here (scroll down past the blue boxes).

I’ve been following house prices on and off for a couple of years now. I’m very much looking forward to not renting anymore once the rest of my circumstances fall into place. When I first started work 2 years ago, many people were saying that I should get on the ladder as soon as possible because the bottom rung would only get further away the longer I waited. That was true for a little while but I had a feeling that house prices had been going up at such a rate for such a sustained period that something would have to change eventually.

One of the metrics that I think is particularly interesting and that you don’t see very often in the news is the ratio of average house price to average (annual) earnings, which both Nationwide and Halifax produce along with their other house price indexes. Here then are two plots of this metric that show where we’ve been and possibly suggest where we’re going…

Nationwide first time buyer house price to earnings ratio

Halifax all houses price to earnings ratio

Looking at these plots, clearly where we have just been with the average house costing around 6 times the average earnings is an above average value for the ratio compared to the last 25 years. Therefore the questions that I’m asking are how low will it go this time around?

As an interesting final thought, even at the top of the peak when you could get a mortgage of 5 times your annual salary, the FSA’s advice was that single people should borrow up to 3 times salary and couples 2.5 times combined salary.

I’ve just got a new phone. It’s a Samsung Omnia (i900) and it looks like this. I’ve been working Vodafone down in price for a few years now so I’ve ended up keeping my current price plan but getting a phone that is usually only available on much more expensive contracts. The only concession I had to make was that I would sign up for 2 years which means if I end up not liking the Omnia, I’ve got a long wait for an upgrade. Fortunately I quite liked my old phone (the ubiquitous Nokia 6300) so I can go back to that if I have to.

So far though it’s pretty good. It runs Windows Mobile 6 with a special Samsung interface on top which essentially attempts to make it feel more like the iPhone interface (as you can see from the picture). It comes with Opera Mobile, which does a pretty good job of emulating the Safari web browser, the camera is pretty good (for a phone), email is easy to set up, the on-screen keyboard works about as well as the iPhone’s, Google Maps works with the GPS (a search for pizza will show the 10 nearest Dominos, etc which is pretty swish), the video player works at both streaming from the internet (but it’s only watchable when you’ve got 3G coverage) and from files stored on the 8GB memory (as long as you encode them into wmv files).

All in all, at the end of week 1 of usage, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not as slick and flashy as the iPhone but it can do pretty much everything the iPhone can do and it’s worked out a few hundred pounds cheaper for me.

Here’s an interesting one…

What day of the year do you think we used up all the natural resources the Earth will produce this year?

According to the Global Footprint Network it was 23rd September this year and is (unsurprisingly) getting earlier every year. To put it another way, since 23rd September we have been living beyond our ecological means.

Now living beyond our financial means is something that many in the West have gotten quite used to. Even our governments do it. We see talentless “celebrities” living lavish lifestyles in the tabloids and think that we deserve that lifestyle too. Unfortunately, many who’ve fallen into this trap don’t have the celebrity income to pay for it. I watched In Debt We Trust (you can watch it here) last week. It highlighted to me again that we have developed this sense of entitlement in western culture – “the people on TV have fancy cars and the latest fashions so I deserve to have those things too”. However, just because you can’t afford doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it, just put it on credit.

In recent months, we’ve started to see the fruits of our behaviour. The credit has dried up and people and businesses are feeling the force of a mess that has been repeatedly covered up by borrowing more (or by Gordon Brown manufacturing growth by redefining it).

How long before we have a similar ecological crunch?

Here’s a final thought – we now need 1.4 Earths per year for our existence to be ecologically sustainable. Until that number goes down to one, we are stealing from our children.