Exasperated Calculator

Helen’s present to me this year was this lovely kitten:

His name is Winston (as he’s a British Shorthair). A few more pictures:

The PNG Department of Treasury has some positions vacant. From the list:

Assistant Secretary(GEP) K31,289 plus other allowances

Or about $16,000 Australian. I don’t think I’ll apply…

(Of course, that’s about 18 times PNG’s GDP per capita, while I only earn a bit over two times Australian GDP per capita).

As you can see, I’m trying to post a bit more often now. I’m going to try and post around three things every day. We’ll see how long this lasts: my money is on less than a week…

(If I go really nuts I might actually finish writing the template for this blog too).

Update: Yep, I did go nuts. It’s pretty buggy though, so hold on to your hat.

Good Riddance!

So: next question - is Mercury a planet?

I think I’ll go get my order in…

Via Marginal Revolution is this neat map of Starbucks and McDonalds’ global reach..

The thing does raise a bit of a rant in me. The chart shows McDonalds as having global sales of $41 billion, which is compared to the GDP of Afghanistan ($21 billion). The message from this is meant to be ‘Wow, McDonalds is twice as big as Afghanistan’. The only problem is that it’s just not true!

GDP is measured in ‘value added’ terms. Only new economic activity is counted. In particular, the cost of inputs (such as burgers, buns and fries) is not counted. So for a company like McDonalds it’s ‘GDP’ is actually equal to its profit on goods sold plus wages and salaries paid to employees, which would be far less than their total sales.

What’s my point? My point is that the world economy is almost incomprehensibly huge, and that even gigantic, omni-present companies such as McDonalds are only a tiny, tiny part of it. Misleading comparisons, such as comparing total sales revenue to GDP figures, takes away some of that sense of scale.

(As an aside, you can calculate a very rough ’sales’ figure for an economy, using the input-output tables that are occasionally published in the National Accounts. In 2001-02, the most recent figures, Australia had a GDP of $890 billion, but had total supplies (’sales’) of $2,457 billion.)

Weight: 107.3kg Breakfast: None Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: Tomato Soup, Turkey & Vegetables, Christmas Pudding Steps: 4,941 Snacks: None

Weight: 105.9kg Breakfast: None Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: Lemon Chicken with Rice Snacks: None Steps: 4,463

Weight: 105.9kg Breakfast: None Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: Rogan Josh with Rice Snacks: Cheese & Biscuits Steps: 6,450

Weight: 106.6kg Breakfast: None (too busy!) Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: Mince with pesto & tomatoes Snacks: None Steps: 5,844

Weight: 108.1kg Breakfast: None (forgot…) Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: ‘Piri piri’ chicken with rice Snacks: None Steps: 9,921

Weight: 109.1kg Breakfast: Just Right Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: Pasta with Chicken & White Wine Sauce Snacks: None Steps: 8,634

OK, not a good couple of months. Time to take this seriously now.

Weight: 110.0kg Brunch: Steak Sandwich Dinner: Ham & Cheese toasted sandwich Snack: Dried apricots Exercise: 18,636 steps Resolve: Very high

From the Los Angeles Times:

Bird flu has killed 134 people around the world, sickened hundreds more and forced the culling of millions of poultry from Vietnam to Nigeria. Now it is smashing the world of badminton.

Which, of course, is why it’s usually a fools errand to try and forecast these second round impacts too closely.

(via Digg).

The Apple World Wide Developer Conference is on next week (7-11 August), and starts with Steve Jobs doing his annual sermon to the faithful. Traditionally he’ll be announcing some shiny new products. This is then the appropriate time for wild speculation about what will get announced. Here are some guesses and thoughts for myself [Updated to add the results]:

• No iPhone. At least, not yet. Why announce this to a bunch of developers? They’re not the key market, and they probably all have Treos anyway. If this is going to happen, it’ll be at a special press event or MacWorld. [Correct]
• Similarly, no new iPod. Just not the right audience, and not the same opportunity to build up a ‘buzz’. [Correct]
• New Macs, without a doubt. I will be astonished if they don’t announce the new Mac Pros, it’s such a clear gap in the product line up. Plus this is a big chunk of the main target market. [Correct]
• Probably a bump to the specs for the MacBook Pros. The gap between the Pro and consumer laptops is a little small, so I guess something will happen here. [Nope]
• A bunch of OS X stuff, obviously, but I’m not across the details of the rumors here. No virtualisation, no new finder, but some new feature no one even realised we’d need (a la Dashboard) would be my guess. [Yep, I'd count Time Machine as meeting that]
• Finally, in the ‘no one else is saying anything’: Apple may finally get around to the tablet PC that they’ve clearly been doing R&D on. Why now? Because they’ll need developers to work on new apps for it, to take advantage of pen based interfaces. This is a very right field prediction, but I really hope its true. My pre-order will be in by the end of the day if it is! [Sadly, nope]

I’ll get back to you with how accurate I am after the keynote on the 7th (8th August Australia time).