The spending database

No-one at the moment really understands it enough to come up with information other than possibly-interesting tidbits. At least the Guardian has broken it down so one can look at it in a spreadsheet - by month is small enough. In April 2009, for instance, total spending net of negative spending by about £57bn, in November (far less money in receipts) it was £81bn. The largest items are - as you might expect - state pensions, the NHS, social security and so on.

The big question surely is - does it pass Benford's Law? This is where the first digit of numbers, regardless of scale (so 10, 150, and 1120 are all "1"), follow a distribution in these proportions:

d p
1 30.1%
2 17.6%
3 12.5%
4 9.7%
5 7.9%
6 6.7%
7 5.8%
8 5.1%
9 4.6%

Anyway,the answer is yes, it does pass, so nothing to see here.

Shop sales 'worst for 15 years'

So is the headline on this BBC piece.

Have a guess if that's true or not? That's right, it's not. In fact shop sales were the best since records began.

The article itself is more accurate, it's the 'worst growth' for 15 years. But let's put this into perspective, the rate of growth was 1.2% (like-for-like was a fall of 0.9%, but that's irrelevant in a macro sense). I don't have the figures to hand, but if GDP in January (which would have to be estimated) was 1.2% higher than in January 2009 it would be a pretty good result. And in a recession partly caused by overstretched household budgets!!

London mapped

This is quite groovy - you can see how many Welsh people live near you, or where you area goes from being deprived to very deprived. That sort of thing, with google maps.