No, Benny, that doesn't help

The words of a Vatican spokesman:

The time has come to conceive of institutions with universal competence (src, via)

But how times have changed! It used to be the case that a Vatican spokesman would have coughed politely after uttering that sentence.

So anyway, now there are going to be thousands of North American dispensationalists rushing to their Scofields, muttering darkly about the Antichrist setting up a world government. Could the Vatican possibly play more truly to the most nutty expectations of premillennial dispensationalists?

On Occupy St. Paul's

1. Let's be clear and call the protest what it is, not what it claims to be. It's causing problems for St. Paul's, and this morning's news was reporting that small businesses like restaurants in the area have also seen trade drop off massively. This is hardly damaging the business of the stock exchange (not that I wish damage on the LSE either, of course), but it's immensely damaging to St. Paul's.
2. The health-and-safety point is probably over-done; they normally are. But even without the H&S busybodies, the cathedral was hardly going to be able to function normally, was it? This is why protestors camp outside the headquarters of large corporations or power stations to which they object: it stops them from functioning normally.
3. The protestors are, at least, being consistent. They're protesting against property rights, and to illustrate their point, they deprive the Church of England of the ability to use its property. As a side-note, may I point out that they are flagging up why property rights are necessary for a civilised society. Imagine living in a world where any idiot could camp in your home or your business, without any way for you to get rid of them. Or imagine a world in which the government trumpets its commitment to free speech but then allows anyone to stop any printing press they like. Property rights matter, because without them individual freedoms are meaningless.
4. On the other hand, they are also being inconsistent: I should expect most of them dislike collateral damage, and yet they are willing to impose it in the pursuit of their cause. There is a difference between killing civilians in the pursuit of a (just) military objective and inconveniencing tourists and Anglicans, of course. But there is also enough similarity to give any thoughtful individual pause for thought.
5. Some protestors say that they will park their own opinions and stay until a vote is taken to move off. To subject your own conscience to majority vote is insane. To require everyone else to subject theirs to majority vote is democratic tyranny. That, I believe, is what lots of the protestors genuinely want: a society in which morality and individual exercise of liberty are subject to majority vote. It's the elevation of democracy to the status of high principle. They think this will make for Paradise; I think it would be hell on earth.
6. Finally, although I expect that this is becoming a case of trespass, I could well understand it if the cathedral authorities didn't particularly want to go to law to sort this out; it looks as if they would prefer to use moral influence. The irony is that protestors of this ilk tend to trumpet their morality loudly to any poor unfortunate in the vicinity; and yet they are evidently not liable to moral suasion. To coin a phrase, they can dish it out, but they can't take it. What a surprise.

Making an e-reader compatible document in LaTeX

A few of my readers, I know, are LaTeX users, and of course, Google often directs people towards things which are useful. For that reason, I thought I'd post here the document code I use to create e-reader compatible .pdf files in LaTeX.

\documentclass[11pt,oneside,reqno]{amsart} \special{papersize=90mm,120mm} \usepackage[papersize={90mm,120mm},margin=2mm]{geometry}

A few notes:

1. The option 11pt can be bumped up to 12pt if all your fonts can handle it. (I use the bbold font to get a nice blackboard bold 1; in turn, it screws up 12pt fonts. There doesn't seem to be a nice way to get everything I want…)
2. Overfull boxes will be the bane of your life for a few reasons. Firstly, the margins are necessarily set extremely narrowly: overfill by about 6pt and you're off the screen. Secondly, if you're producing documents in dual format (A4 and e-reader, for example), then you will get the boxes right for at most one of the formats at any one time, unless you put pretty much all your equations into display mode.
3. Generally speaking, .pdf documents cannot be scaled in e-readers, hence the need for a special setup. Until the ePub crowd get their mathematical act together, this is the best solution I have found.
4. It is designed to fit a 6" screen, which sits nicely between the 5" and 7" which are about the smallest and largest on the market. The fact that it is also the size of my e-reader's screen is entirely beside the point.

Occupy what?

We shall occupy… something!

Demonstrators in London were planning to set up a protest camp outside St Paul's Cathedral in a move inspired by Occupy Wall Street, which has seen a large gathering of people camp in New York's financial district since September.

One protester, Peter, said: "We're occupying and opening up this space directly next door to an institution which gambled with our economy recklessly and criminally." (src)

Look, I know that in spite of its long association with London, the custodians and employees of so great and venerable an institution have not always been found acting in the better interests of either the city of the wider nation; indeed, that it has at times been a den of thieves and a nest of vipers. We understand these things. But I am really at a loss to understand what the Church of England has done this time.

Yes, Sir Humphrey

Several countries, including the UK, [are] concerned that a wide-ranging debate on new EU treaties could lead to acrimonious fights within each member state that could destabilise the union. (src)

'Concerned'? I thought it was common knowledge that the raison d'être of UK membership of the EU was so that we could destabilise it from within:

Inside, we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.

Which of course is why we needed the Poles, the Slovaks and the rest in before the current crisis:

The more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.

It's called diplomacy.

Peston: still an idiot

Stamp duty raises an invaluable £3bn a year for the exchequer. (src)

Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert. There are just a few things wrong with this. Firstly, £3bn is not 'invaluable'. I can tell you what its value is: £3bn. Seriously. Almost anything else you can call invaluable, but money, by definition, cannot be invaluable.

Secondly, £3bn is less than a half a percent of the UK government's tax revenue. It's not even significant.

Thirdly, your datum is insufficient to deduce that the first derivative of revenue with respect to headline rate is positive. (I am not making the counterclaim, or indeed any claim other than a lack of information.)

Fourthly, you cannot know the counterfactual: what if scrapping stamp duty on shares resulted in an investment boom which raised revenues from corporation tax and income tax beyond the £3bn you so laud here? It's a possibility, and one which you cannot discount without evidence, if you want to be serious about this analysis.