Is the coffee in train stations expensive because the coffee retailers are exploiting the desperate and barely awake commuters who are "price-blind"? Not really. The reason the coffee is so expensive is that the retailer needs to pay the extortionate rent charged by rail company, which owns the train station and therefore has a monopoly on the first land those coffee-deprived commuters set foot on. It's that rail company, with its scarce resource, that makes the extra profit from your expensive coffee, not the coffee retailer.

Tim Harford is the Financial Times' Undercover Economist, and his book of the same name applies economic theory to explain everyday curiosities, in a similar manner to Freakonomics. Also like Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist is a fascinating read with no economics pre-requisites, which should appeal to any non-economists.

Why are airport departure lounges so crappy and uncomfortable? Is it because the airport is struggling for money and can't afford more comfortable chairs? Perhaps. How about Tesco own-brand products, with their plain red and blue packaging; is the cost of a few more colours a limiting factor in the design of this packaging? In truth, the regular departure lounges have to be sufficiently bare and uncomfortable to motivate the business and first class passengers to fork out for their drastically more expensive plane tickets (and the associated departure lounge experience). It's not that better product design would break the bank for Tesco’s own-brand vegetable soup, just that better design would make the customer less likely to fork out for the more expensive alternative option.

It is important for retailers to keep the “premium gap” open, and not let the budget options trail too closely behind the premium option. If the premium gap gets too narrow, then some premium customers will “leak” to the budget option when they decide it’s good enough for them.

This is the sort of analysis you can expect from The Undercover Economist, illustrated with engaging examples (such as explaining the effect of zero-marginal-cost by looking at the drunken chaos that results from offering fixed-entry unlimited-drinks parties to university students).

And if you haven’t had enough after reading the book, you can follow the More or Less radio show (also available as a podcast) hosted by Tim Harford and packed with more amusing and topical analysis.

Last weekend Kelley had a reading at the Wordsworth Trust, in the Lake District, so we decided to make a long weekend of it. The timing was perfect, given St. Valentine’s day on the Sunday.

Thursday Evening

First we took the overnight sleeper train to Carlisle on Thursday night — they woke us up with tea and biscuits at about 4:30am. A former colleague of mine, David, lives near Carlisle in a village called Caldbeck and graciously offered to pick us up at our rather anti-social arrival time.

Friday

After a few more hours sleep at his house, and after the kids were off to school, we were out for a walk with David and his wife, Clare. We went up Ullock Pike, along Longside Edge, to Carl Side with the option of continuing to Skiddaw. The weather was not the “clear skies” that were forecast. We spent a good time being buffeted by wind and sleet, and opted out of Skiddaw extension:

Kelley on the descent from Karl Side; David and Clare up ahead.

 
Later on: Back down to sea level.

Saturday

Saturday’s main event was Kelley’s poetry reading at the Wordsworth Trust, where she was representing Flambard Press in the final of a series of three events highlighting small independent publishers. But not before we’d had a tour of Dove Cottage and lunch, courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust.

Saturday: A tour of Dove Cottage before the poetry event.

The view from William Wordsworth’s own private piece of mountain.

Kelley participating in the question panel, after everyone had spoken.

 
The view from Grasmere.

Sunday

On Sunday we got up early and managed to sneak up the nearby Helm Crag whilst the weather was relatively nice. We were back in time for a hearty lunch, though not before Kelley managed to sink calf-deep into a concealed bog near the Far Easedale Gill.

Sunday: Walking up Helm Crag near Grasmere; the weather a little more pleasant.

45 minutes later: Atop Helm Crag.

The sheep were un-phased by the giant snow flakes.

 
Nutrition: Welsh Rarebit with bacon and poached egg; chocolate milkshake on the side.

Monday

Finally on Monday, it was time for a leisurely morning and a trip on the bus to Windermere in time to catch our afternoon train back to London. The regular train was faster, though not nearly as roomy nor quiet as the sleeper train we took up there. Still, it was a good acclimatisation exercise to prepare us for our return from the peaceful countryside to the bustling city of London.

It’s that time of year again: time for some life-admin in the form of renewing the car insurance. It’s the most fun I’ve had since Christmas! Even though I’m now over 25 and have managed to build up two years’ no claims discount, apparently I still need all the help I can get when it comes beating down the price of my car insurance. (Maybe it’s something to do with this incident; though it wasn’t my fault!)

I ended up renewing my policy with Admiral, after discovering that their customer service is absolutely awesome, their renewal quote was reasonable, and they gave me a discount just for asking!

Admiral: Their website is a bit clunky, but the customer service is awesome. These are definitely the people I’d want to be dealing with if I ever need to make a claim. (Now, if only every call centre could be this good.)

The Process

To save dealing directly with insurers one-by-one you can go to comparison sites that gather quotes from dozens of insurers at once; and to save having to choose which of the comparison sites to use, you go to Martin Lewis’ Car Insurance Guide. There he will tell you not only which comparison sites to use, but the most efficient order to use them in! (Updated every quarter based on a full survey!) He’ll even optimise your job role: if you’re a software consultant you can save ~5% on your premium just by calling yourself a computer engineer instead.

After some eye-watering “best” quotes from the comparison sites, the renewal quote from Admiral wasn’t looking so bad. To take it down further I took my wife off the policy — she has decided not to go through with getting a full UK license for now, so taking her off the policy as a provisional driver was bound to help.

I also checked in with my friends at A-Plan insurance brokers to see if they could work some magic (don’t bother filling out the form on the website — call them on the phone and you’ll get a ballpark figure in 5 minutes. Ask for Jason Jarratt; tell him I sent you :-) Unfortunately Jason’s quick search yielded similarly eye-watering quotes to what I’d seen before,  so much so that he didn’t think there was much hope of finessing down the price with some direct negotiations. He advised me to stick with my current insurer.

The Findings

In the end, after about half a day of research I was barely able to beat my renewal quote. This came as quite a surprise; I thought insurers were meant to screw you on the renewals to exploit the inattentive and lazy? Maybe they only do that after the first couple of renewals, once they know you’re not paying attention and don’t have enough spare time to shop around...

I had already called Admiral to see about taking my wife off the policy and Tiffany was very friendly and helpful, so I figured there was nothing to lose in calling them again. Much to my surprise they were accepting calls at 8:30pm, how nice! I think their call centre is in the USA since both times I called the person I spoke to had an accent; I guess it makes it easier for them to be so friendly if it’s only 3:30pm where they are (rather than 2am for a call centre in India).

The Clincher

So I called Admiral and said I’d found a slightly cheaper quote; could they match it? After confirming the details of the policy to check everything was up to date (it was), the also-super-friendly Bethann put me on hold and went to speak to her manager. A minute later she was back with the offer of a discount that was almost 10% off the premium! My premium is pretty hefty, so that discount is nothing to scoff at. That’s quite a result for just asking!

It’s a good thing I got that discount too, because before she let me go the super-friendly-Bethann also managed to charm me in to an optional courtesy car upgrade. I got a bit of a spiel from Tiffany as well, before she’d let me go, so I assume it’s their ploy to win you over with awesome customer service then try for the up-sell. It’s okay; she earned it.

Meet Clive Wearing; a man with the worst case of amnesia ever known. Twenty-five years ago he lost his memory and now his wife, Deborah, is the only person he recognises. He is constantly under the impression that he has just come out of a lengthy period of unconsciousness, so every time he sees her he greets her with the enthusiasm of being reunited after years apart.

Clive Wearing has a neurological disorder called anterograde amnesia which is a condition that doesn't allow new memories to transfer into long-term memory. This means that he will never remember anything since his incident, similar to Leonard in the movie Memento.

On March 29, 1985 Clive came home with a very bad headache which wouldn’t go away for days, and wouldn’t respond to any medication. By the fourth day he had a high fever, and forgot his daughter’s name; by the fifth day he was very delirious.

Clive had contracted the Herpes simplex virus which attacked his brain and caused damage to the left and right temporal lobes as well as the frontal lobe. The temporal lobes contain a structure called the hippocampus which is involved in memory function, and in Clive’s case the hippocampus has almost certainly been destroyed in both sides of the brain.

Before his illness, Clive was a successful musicologist and conductor. One of the few things that have survived intact is his ability to read music and play the piano.

Now his memory-span is so short that he will often forget the beginning of a sentence before you have completed it. Or he may begin answering a question but forget the question before he’s finished with his answer. It’s not uncommon to forget what you ordered for lunch by the time the food is served; but Clive additionally doesn’t remember which flavours belong to which foods.

Happy Holidays from the Straight No Chaser men’s a capella, Indiana University.

Flatterland (2001), by Ian Stewart, is the long-awaited sequel to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (written in 1884!) — an imaginary story about two-dimensional beings living in a two-dimensional world. I’ve not read the original Flatland, but I have it on good authority that Flatterland is much better.

This book is essentially a mash-up of an easy-going children’s story with hard-core mathematical concepts that will stretch your mind. Flatland is a 2-dimensional world where females are lines with razor-sharp end-points; males are two-dimensional shapes; browsing the interline is always wireless because otherwise you’d be trapped inside a network of cables with no way to get out; meat comes mainly from oxagons – hexagons crossed with octagons; and books come as long lines rolled up into a spiral.

Vikki, a line from Flatland, is taken on a tour of different worlds by her guide, a space-hopper. On the way, they explore 3-dimensional space, 4-dimensional space, higher-dimensions, fractional dimensions, and more.

Although the story is fictional, the facts and concepts are most certainly not fictional. They explain the concepts of Hamming distance and error-detecting/error-correcting encodings in a way that is remarkably clearer than my university lectures on information theory! They visit topological worlds where doughnuts and two-holed doughnuts turn into teacups and teapots respectively. The milk comes from a one-sided cow named moobius, whose tail is joined to its nose with a twist; oh, and the milk is served in Klein bottles.

The book is full of incredibly witty puns, which are highly amusing for the scientifically-minded reader who has come across some of these mathematical concepts, and enjoys geeky jokes. One example: Moobius, the one-sided cow, has a loud marching band playing from within – this music cannot be stopped because that would be incredibly “orienting”, and besides, he is nothing without his “band”. (Geeky-pun explanation: A Möbius strip is a single-sided non-orientable two-dimensional surface embedded in three dimensions, and can be constructed by taking a band of paper and gluing its ends together with a twist.)

A non-technical reader can just ignore all the incredible puns and still enjoy the book, with all its challenging thought experiments and odd situations, written in an easy-to-read style.

It’s been exactly a year since we got the broadband connected here. I ran a speed test at the time and was much impressed with the results:

2008 Speed Test Results

We’re on the O2 Standard Home package, which is rated at "Up to 8 meg" downstream and "Up to 1.3 meg" upstream, so I was quite impressed to be getting rather close to these ideals.

Let’s see how things are a year on:

2009 Speed Test Results

• The SpeedTest.net test server is allegedly 300 miles closer than it was last year.
• Which might be why the ping is marginally down, from 39ms to 32ms.
• Upload speed has decreased by 8% since last year’s value (from 1.11Mb/s to 1.02Mb/s).
• Download speed has decreased by 12% since last year’s value (from 8.05Mb/s to 7.05Mb/s).

So overall marginally worse than last year, but still quite good when you consider the variability of home broadband connection speeds. And given the level of customer service I received recently, I'm in no hurry to switch broadband providers.

I finally decided to upgrade my ageing Orange SmartPhone E650 (which is just a re-branded HTC s710) to something a little modern, namely the HTC Touch HD. It’s kind of like an iPhone, except that it runs Windows Mobile. Also, the screen is larger, and has more than twice the resolution of an iPhone. The built-in camera has a 5 megapixel resolution, which is nice (also more than twice that of the iPhone). The only thing is that it doesn’t support multi-touch, but I’m not too bothered about that. The full-screen video streaming experience is enough to compensate for that. And it comes with a handy little soft carry pouch, to protect the screen from knocks and scratches in your pockets. Very practical!

It’s nice to see that HTC has made a brand name for themselves, and entered the market without re-branding their gear. They even sponsored one of the pro-cycling teams participating in the Tour de France this year, so they must be doing well! (It looks like they made a good choice in team to sponsor too, because Columbia-HTC was the team with that guy who’s a bit good at winning sprints, and breaking British cycling records: Mark Cavendish.)

After last time I negotiated an upgrade with the Orange “disconnections” department I knew that a hard bargain was the route to success. By the end of the conversation they were offering me a free phone upgrade, on a cheap contract, with unlimited minutes and texts, and unlimited mobile internet for free! (This was after the previous guy I spoke to advised me that for ~£7.50 per month I could have up to 250MB of mobile internet browsing per month, but told me there was absolutely no unlimited plan available from Orange.) I really think the “disconnections” (i.e. “customer retention”) department has pretty much free reign to offer you whatever deal is needed to keep you on as a customer.

Alas, Orange discontinued the HTC Touch HD a few months ago; something to do with software problems — perhaps as a result of the branding “customisations” they do on the phones they sell — although I didn’t find out the reason for sure.

Instead I decided to go with O2 as a provider, who have a (publically advertised) unlimited web bundle for £7.50 per month, and very good contract deals available through mobiles.co.uk. My base contract is only £20 per month, with a good chunk of minutes, unlimited texts, and a £5 monthly discount on the O2 Home Broadband which we already have!

So far, so good.

Lance Armstrong may not have won the Tour de France 2009, but let’s not forget that he won a few Tours de France before that. Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force, by Daniel Coyle is a book about one of those tours.

The book is not just about the 2004 Tour de France — only the final one-third covers the Tour. The first two-thirds are all about the rest of the season before that, the wider pro-cycling peloton in 2004, and all the things around it. Training and preparations for the tour, including long hours in the saddle during the off-season, meticulously procuring the best equipment available (which Lance affectionately terms “The Shit”) and the equipment which he hopes will blow away the opposition (“The Shit That Will Kill Them”); Lance’s every-day life, interactions with his then-girlfriend, Sheryl Crow, and his kids. And although Lance is obviously the main subject, Dan does a good job of covering a number of other riders and teams as well.

Dan has an engaging writing style and covers a lot of interesting details, from the style with which Floyd Landis entered the road racing scene, to the words coming over the radio into Lance’s ear during the final time trial. I don’t think this book is just for the cycling enthusiasts; I read a little to my wife (who has no interest in cycling) and she was pleasantly surprised, saying that the writing was a lot more colourful and dynamic, talking more about the riders than the technicalities of cycling. Dan also includes a succinct appendix which can get the complete novice up-to-speed on pro cycling, types of races, teams, tactics, and cheating, in under 9 pages.

“Riders eat and drink the equivalent of three Thanksgiving dinners a day during the Tour.”

It was Lance Armstrong that said cycling doesn’t get any easier; you just go faster. Which essentially means that cycling is a competition about how much pain you can tolerate. Thus, it attracts some truly spectacular competitors. Such as one of Lance Armstrong’s former teammates, Floyd Landis.

Here is a description of Floyd’s initial entry into the cyclist road racing scene:

He showed up for his first road race wearing a garish jersey, a visored helmet, and a pair of brilliantly colored Argyle socks, pulled high. He made his way slowly to the front row... wheeling a bike with a monstrously big 56-tooth front chain ring, so large that it resembled a pie plate. A slow crater of disgusted amazement widened around Landis... Then in a loud voice that rang with Mennonite clarity, Landis said what he'd planned to say, a reading from the First Book of Floyd:

"If there's anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner."

Laughter. Landis remained quiet, then replied.

"You shouldn't laugh, because that gets me angry. And if you make me angry, then I'm going to blow you all up."¹

More Laughter.

The race began, and Floyd rode up to the leaders. Then past them. He pressed the pace, slowly at first and then faster and faster, pushing his pie plate until it hummed, until the others felt like they were trying to follow a motorcycle.

"You like my socks?" he asked. "How do you like them now?"

They gasped for air.

"I'll take that for a yes," Landis continued. "How about if I go a little farther up the road, and you can tell me how they look from there?"

Landis won his first race by fifteen minutes, including a stop to repair his punctured tire. He won his second race by 45 minutes.

"Get Floyd emotionally involved and there's no way he'll back down," Geoghegan said. "He will go until his heart literally explodes."

           — Tour de Force, by Daniel Coyle

And before his entry into road racing he was a competitive mountain biker, known for riding wheelies during races... going uphill.

Footnote:
¹No, he wasn't threatening terrorist activity. In cycling, to "blow up" means to run out of energy, usually in a spectacular and catastrophic manner.