55% doesn't seem right.

In the general hoopla about the LibDem-Con coalition, one thing has received little attention, though it has been picked up by a couple of people like Peter Hennessey.

This is that to make fixed term parliaments stickable, they want to change the law so that a government can't be brought down without a 55% majority against them.   But this is to confuse two things.   One is whether a government survives or not, and the other is whether to have a general election.   In principle they are separate.   The fact that David Cameron is PM now should not give him a lease until 2015, even if all the individual MPs do have that lease.    He needs to be able to be brought down in a confidence vote, possibly leading to another prime minister, either Tory or from another party.

For a confidence vote in the government, which means in practice in the Prime Minister, it should be 50% + 1 against to win.   Otherwise there is the ridiculous idea of a government which can't put any of its business through, but which can't be kicked out.

On the other hand, to stop the PM calling an election when he wants, you need a larger number than 55%.    Many PMs with a large majority could have got 55% of their MPs on their own.   Both of Tony Blair's first parliaments for example, and the second of Maggie's three victories.    So it doesn't really stop a dominant PM calling an election.   Even in this parliament, Tories plus Lib Dems have more than 55%, so could if they agreed force an election.

And this seems a nicely tuned number ... Con + LD is > 55% so can call an election anytime.  But Con >  45% so can't be defeated on a vote of confidence anytime.  So, theoretically, Cons could discard the coalition and form an invincible minority government.    Have the Lib Dems been sold a pup on this one?

In practice confidence votes to bring down a government are very rare - the last one in 1979 only months before the end of the parliament.    So it's unlikely this matters very much.  But my main point remains.  There needs to be the standard threshold for bringing down a government, but a much higher threshold than 55% to call an election.

Deborah Underwood sales widgets

A business model to die for?

Here's a business model to die for.   A newish mail client for macs that you have to pay money for, called Postbox.

It's based on Thunderbird, which is free.   It competes with Apple Mail, which is free and built in to the OS.  And it doesn't have support for Exchange servers, which is what I need to read my email.

And it costs $39.95.

I'm not buying shares.

Get 55, or any other number, with three 4s.

SPOILER ALERT.   This post contains the solution to this week's  Car Talk puzzler.

The puzzle is construct the number 55 using three 4s and any mathematical symbols you like.  I remembered that somewhere I had come across a general solution to this, maybe from Halmos's book "Problems for Mathematicians Young and Old".

I half remembered it involved logs and square roots, and I managed to reconstruct it.    First of all I did it with 2's.   The first image shows you how to do it (constructed using a lovely tool called LaTeXiT.)   The number of square root symbols in a row is n, if you want to get the number n.   So for car talk it would be 55 square roots.

I was puzzling over how to do it with 4's, and my wife couldn't understand my problem.    Because she didn't realise I didn't realise that every 2 could be replaced with the square root of 4.   So the second image shows that, and so this time there are n+1 square roots, in the car talk puzzle there would be 56.

So my wife is just slightly more intelligent than me, which as we all know is the best kind of wife.     I love her.

A bag in a bag in a bag. An empty bag.

I flew on British Airways to Lisbon and back this last week.     In a vestigial remnant of providing us with food service, they gave us sandwiches.    To make life easy for cleanup they provided a trash bag.

Or put it this way.

They provided a plastic bag in a plastic bag in a plastic bag.   And the (innermost) bag was empty.  

There was a bag with tissue and stuff in it.   The bag was of course plastic.   Inside this bag one of the items was a small plastic bag.  In that, very neatly folded up, was a plastic trash bag.

So yes, they gave me a plastic bag in a plastic bag in a plastic bag.   And the plastic bag was empty.

Subscriber Trunk Dialling

Rang up Sky to cancel the sports package, since the cricket season is over.    The voice asked me to enter my phone number "including STD code."  I can't remember the last time I heard this phrase.   Rather like Wireless was replaced by Radio over the years, STD has been replaced by Area Code or similar.  

The nice chap from Sky also asked if it was ok to call me Ian, which seemed very polite and nice.  I wish more people would do that kind of thing.    It is fine, but it isn't for all people, and some people want to be called by other names like their second name or a nickname.

My parents' wedding in colour

Hubert Gent married Margaret Luke on July 5th, 1948, the very day the NHS was started.  Though I believe there were no calamities on the day that resulted in the new service being used.  The reception was held at the North British Hotel, much later criminally renamed the Balmoral.    Since my grandfather had bought champagne and didn't like the corkage charge at the hotel, a second reception was held at their house (if I've remembered this right.)

Astonishingly for the time, a friend took a colour film of the event.    A gallery of snapshots from the film is on flickr.