The blog of Steve Root

  • Learn french in 10 days…. assuming you don't need sleep?

    My French prof runs an email list of… well, a mixture of humour, observations and such, the sort that many people forward to your email. The good thing for me is that a lot of it is in French and try as I might, I often have to really work at reading it.

    213-learnin10days-thumb-250x189.png

    If I don’t understand a word, I’ll open google and translate it. If I still don’t understand it, I’ll translate a sentence. One word in the last email was “entuber”. Google didn’t know the english translation so I search the web. Entuber = to con, apparently commonly used though colloquial. The web site I found the answer on had an advert to “Learn French in 10 days”. Well, clearly I’ve not been trying hard enough. I followed the link to find out more (always looking to improve, to think I’ve spent years trying, on an off, to `parler en plus francais` [Sic]*) so I had to find out more.

    The course contains a very comprehensive ‘More than 200 hours learning’…. Well, I’ve learn’t enough maths to know that 200 hours / 10 days = 20 hours per day of learning. Clearly I’ve been limiting myself by requiring more than 4 hours per day for sleep, eating, washing and such.

    *[sic] because I know the grammar is wrong, the spelling is wrong, but that’s how I’d say it. Full marks for effort, ‘nil point’ for grace 🙂

  • Perelandra (C.S. Lewis) and That Hideous Strength (C.S.Lewis)


    Part 2 and Part 3 of a trilogy I started in the summer with “Out of the Silent Planet“. I loved the first book, giving it a Rootie rating of 5 out of 5, surely these would carry the trend, may be drop to a 4?…

    Perelandra sees our character visit a different planet. This planet is almost entirely covered by sea and floating islands made of plants. The description of the environment was great but for me the story dragged more than if I’d had to read it as part of my English Literature lessons at school. I really can’t say I enjoyed this story, just forced myself to continue turning pages. I give it a Rootie Rating of 1 out 5 and hope the third part of the trillogy is better.

    That Hideous Strength is different from the first two. Hmmm, how to describe the difference; instead of traveling to another planet, the whole story happens on earth. It links into early medieval history and the time of Merlin the magician. It has a clever set up where people are used by others to control the media and alter the perception of society. For all that, I found this story very hard to read through. This trilogy started so well for me, but I can only give this part a Rootie Rating of 1 out of 5.

  • 15% VAT – How to work it out from 17.5% inc prices

    It appears a lot of people have been looking at my waffle on “Markup and Margins” page in order to convert prices from “inclusive of 17.5% VAT” to “inclusive of 15% VAT”. By the way, if you’re not in the UK, VAT = Value Added Tax and after many many years of it being 17.5%, it’s just been changed to 15%. The government have said they will increase it again after one year.

    So, if you want to know WHY the following calculations work, read about Markup and Margins – VAT is a Markup type of calculation. If you just want to know what to tap into your calculator or spreadsheet, here’s what you do:

    To convert a price from 17.5% inc VAT to 15% inc VAT – Multiply by 0.9787 (beware of rounding!)
    Example: 117.50p x 0.9787 = 115.00

    To convert a price including VAT at 17.5% to an Excluding VAT price – Divide by 1.175
    Example: 117.50 / 1.175 = 100.00

    To add VAT at 15% to an Excluding VAT price – multiply by 1.15
    Example: 100 x 1.15 = 115.00

    The dangers of rounding.
    Currency is used with an accuracy of 2 decimal places, the smallest unit being 0.01 or 1pence. The exact result of 117.50 x 0.9787 is 114.99725. As we don’t have a coin for 0.725 of a pence, we need to round up. Depending on when you round a number in a calculation, you can get an error that grows as you use that number in further calculations. To help prevent this you have two options,
    1) you could multiply by a more accurate figure, like 0.97872340425531914893617021276596,
    2) divide by 1.175 then multiply that answer by 1.15, which is the method I prefer as I find it easier to remember

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