Chris Worfolk's Blog

Earlier this month, Yorkshire welcomed the Tour de France to Yorkshire for the Grand Depart. Or “T’ Big Setting Off” as we call it in Yorkshire.

People have gone all out for it. There are bikes, artwork, banners, signs everywhere. Even people nowhere near the route have a bike on the wall and a transfer on their shop window.

The turnout was incredible too. So much so that an hour before the race started the police closed off the road to pedestrians and stopped letting anyone else through. All along the route it was stacked with people half a dozen deep.

You would have to have a heart of stone to suggest seeing that wasn’t worth waiting for.

When I was twelve I spent six hours in 35 degree heat waiting for a Space Shuttle to take off. Finally we saw this little dot disappear into the distance and then in the silence some kid said “is that it?” As good as that was, it can’t really compare to seeing the photo above.

Nevertheless, it makes you proud to be Yorkshire. If you have a fancy bike ride you need hosting, we’re your people.

Well this feels a lot more official now.

Pretty gutted that after seven months of having my Sonos Playbar, it died.

Sonos were very good about it. I spoke to them on the phone and we tried a few things to no response. After that they send me through a return request that came with a pre-paid UPS sticker, so I just had to wrap it up and schedule a collection from UPS. They even shipped me a new one straight away, though that did require a credit card pre-authorisation.

Pretty annoying though, if that happens just after the warranty runs out, I will be very unhappy.

“Out of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, we’ve invaded or fought conflicts in the territory of 171.” Or so the book’s description reads.

The author, Stuart Laycock, begins by talking about how he was trying to list all of the countries that Britain had invaded. The more he thought about it, the longer his list got, and the longer his list got, the more it would seem to make an interesting topic for a book.

It did. He goes through each country in alphabetical order discussing Britain’s involvement in it. Some of which is extensive, others were just fought a battle there. Importantly, he spends more time talking about these lesser known incidents than he does discussing the history that most of us already know about (World Wars for example).

It is written in a very informal style. This keeps the mood light and prevents it from becoming a monotonous list of events. It perhaps could have done with some editing though. The phrase “you might think we’ve never invaded X country, but you would be wrong” or some variant of that expression seems to appear on every other page. To be honest, given I am reading a book about how we have invaded almost every country, I wasn’t thinking that.

There is some history that I had no idea about, and much that I did kind of know about but had never really heard about in detail, and this filled in a lot of knowledge.

A few weeks ago I attended Toastmasters district training where I found out there was such a thing as a “triple crown”. The way I found it out was that Kevin said “congratulations on your triple crown, here is a prize”. Apparently, if you earn three educational awards in the same TM year, there is a name for that…

Unfortunately it is also the world’s most useless USB drive as it it failed to register the first time I plugged it in and then died when I tried to copy a file to it.

A few months ago we had a discussion about housing. As people who are approaching thirty and thinking about settling down probably tend to do. It got me thinking about how much perception affects your thinking. For example Hugh said he was looking at West Leeds because that has the nicest areas, whereas I would sheer clear of West Leeds because I think the nicest areas are in North and East Leeds.

The Sunday Times is a big North Leeds fan apparently. They named Chapel Allerton and Otley as two of the best places to live. Leeds List suggested Horsforth, Calverley and Ilkley as the places to be, while avoiding Headingley, Beeston and Seacroft.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to lay out where I think are the most desirable places to live and compare it to what everyone else thinks. So do post your thoughts. I’ve tried to stop where it becomes it’s own place (Wakefield, Bradford, Ikley, etc) but there is very subjective also so there is no clear cut off point. There is a similar problem with want counts as an area in its own right.

I’m not convinced Morley actually is a desirable place to live, but I didn’t know what else to put in that box.

As I said in the introduction, a lot of this depends on perception. Thus, I think a lot of you will feel differently. This also explains why you should not be offended when I have described your neck-of-the-woods as undesirable. I am sure it is full of lovely people.

Today is the tenth anniversary of my blog. That is a long time. If it was a child, it would soon be finishing primary school! For the fifth anniversary I had balloons. No such care has been taken for this one. Though I do hope you have been “overwhelmed by fun” as my first blog post declared as an aim.

I have not gone back and read a lot of my old posts. They’re probably horrible. My views have changed a lot over the past decade, especially during the past year. I was an idiot when I was 17. I am an idiot now, but at least I know enough to know that. By the time I reach my grandparent’s age, I might actually know something useful.

Stats

• I have written 3,284 posts
• That represents 6.3 posts per week
• 1,444,814 spam comments have been posted
• Last month 15,214 people visited my blog
• The most popular month was June 2013 when 17,651 people visited
• The most popular search term for reaching my blog is “charles darwin”

The Rise of Darwin is a new one. For years the most popular way for people to find my blog was searching for my food chain diagram.

For once I went out and actually bought an old-fashioned printed book. For some things, it is nice to have a physical reference than you can scribble on and twist into various shapes for convenient viewing. This was one of those times.

The book was pretty short, explaining what I wanted to know in a concise manner. This was great because I got through it all in an afternoon and can use it as a reference going forward as well. Top marks.

There are lots of different reports that rank nations according to various criteria to tell you who is best at something. Education, healthcare, equality, prosperity, the lists go on. The problem with these lists is that they can be very subjective and so it is difficult to trust which ones are a) accurate and b) measuring something meaningful.

The Fin Global Development Index solves this problem. We have taken 23 different indexes and averaged them to produce a score for each country. This helps prevent bias in any one report from moving a countries position.

Secondly, I took ensure that a fair criteria was used. Rather than measure on the criteria that was used to build the report, I took a simple premise.

We all know that Finland is the happiest, most developed, generally best place in the world. It has an unmatched education system, high social mobility, and achieves such levels of happiness that most of its population manage to not kill themselves even though it is dark, miserable and freezing cold six months of the year.

Therefore, based on this premise, countries were awarded points based on how close they were to Finland in each of the rankings. Having an equal score resulted in zero points, being one place away was one point, and so on. Therefore if Finland ranked 4th in the world, you would earn zero points by being joint-forth, one point for being 3rd or 5th, and so on. The object being to score the lowest amount of points.

Countries represented

A selection of countries were chosen to represent the world. These included a selection of developed nations, as well as developing nations to use as comparisons. The complete list of countries included were:

• Norway
• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• France
• Spain
• Germany
• Estonia
• United States
• Canada
• Australia
• Japan
• India
• China
• Brazil
• Saudi Arabia

Indexes

The following index were used to compile the report:

• GDP (PPP) per capita
• Life expectancy
• Infant mortality
• Press Freedom Index
• Pearson education index
• Education Index
• European Health Consumer Index
• WHO healthcare rankings
• Human Development Index
• World Happiness Report
• Long-term unemployment (OECD)
• Government transparency (OECD)
• Global Slavery Index
• Social Progress Index
• Cancer rate (OECD)
• Health care quality (OECD)
• Suicide rate (OECD)
• Corruption Perceptions Index
• Globalisation Index
• Failed States Index
• International Property Rights Index
• Legatum Prosperity Index
• Alcohol consumption (OECD)

Results

Analysis

When plotted as a percentage graph with zero representing a perfect score and India (who scored the highest) representing the worst possible score, most developed countries represent similar levels of development.

Click for a larger version.

The highest ranking countries were Sweden, Norway and Canada. There is a possible bias for Northern Europe to share a similar culture and therefore score better on some of the metrics, or it could simply be that these countries are uniformly excellent (or more likely both).

It is also possible that OECD countries benefited from the inclusion of those lists as because there are less states on there, they may be moved closer together. This is unlikely to have had a large effect, as most non-OECD countries would not score that highly, but will have had some effect.

Conclusion

Northern Europe and Canada are the best places to live. Unless you dislike freezing your balls off, in which case you might want to consider the United Kingdom or Australia. You probably do not want to live in India.