There are a few articles floating around the web on how the human mind naturally preceives numbers on a logarithmic scale. Scalar abstraction of numbers is only a function of education and conditioning.

What this essentially means is that given a range of numbers, say 0 - 100, we see 1 and 2 to be further apart than 99 and 100. An article (somewhat heavy!) about the subject can be found here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2610411

This may go some way to explaining why we don't particularly mind paying an extra €50 on the price of a €7000 car but wouldn't dream of paying €51 for a €1 coffee. The end result is the same, we lose €50. It also may explain why we tip more in a restaurant to a waitress that's done the same amount of work as a waitress in a café or bar. (Thanks to Al Jafee of Mad Magazine for the latter observation made sometime in the 70's).

Now I know why I failed mathematics at university!

With CERNs Large Hadron Collider coming online sometime later this year I though it prudent to re-distribute my test for universal destruction.

Click the link below and follow the instructions on how to use it. I will reset the borrowed time counter when the LHC goes online again.

http://www.lobsterweb.com/lhc.html

Budget day has always been one of my least favourite days of the year. As a child my daily ritual when I returned home from school would be to drop my school bag, blazer and all thoughts of doing any homework on the floor and turn on the television. If I was lucky The Flintstones would be on and would start the job of erasing anything useful I had learnt that day. I knew I could sit back and enjoy thirty minutes of mass produced Hanna Barbera pap before the news started and my rank in the household would become painfully clear as I was ejected from the sofa. This was back in the day before 24 hour rolling news when watching a mere 30 minutes of the days events meant something, imagine that!

On budget day however, The Flinstones, Smurfs and their ilk would have to take a back seat while the world's most boring man made the world's most boring speech in the world's most boring room. I'm sure that before I was a teenager the budget speech lasted for several days (they must have shortened it around 1985 due to popular demand) and I felt a dismay that only a nine year old denied his favourite cartoon can feel.

As I grew older I developed a growing interest in the budget, not so much to keep up with the effect it would have on my finances, but to watch the reactions of the media and people around me. One could guarantee that beer and tobacco duty would go up, if you don't want to pay more tax then don't drink and don't smoke because it's bad for you, right? The media would then find a balanced example of public opinion by interviewing drunk smokers in one northern pub.  I used to work in a pub and could guarantee on the evening of a budget the majority of customers would complain about the five pence addition to the cost of each and every one of the ten pints they sank that night. The chancellor had only put a penny on the price of a pint but any shrewd landlord knows that the punters don't want to be messing around with coppers when they're busy drinking.

Onto today's budget. The chancellor has announced debts, losses, write offs and increased taxation of such staggering magnitude that it means nothing to the layman. Tell a man he'll lose £250 from his bank account he'll be so angry he might even wave a placard in the street, tell him the country has lost £15 billion and a quick shrug of the shoulders tells all. Oh, beer and tobacco duty went up as well.

So now that the truth of the government borrowing beyond its means to fund this last ten years growth is firmly in the minds of the public what is the proposed plan to solve things? Borrow more! In fact almost double the planned borrowing to £606 billion by the year 2013. I'm no economist but I am aware of the saying "you can't borrow your way out of debt". If this is true for you or I, why wouldn't it hold true for a country?

Personally I don't trust the current batch of politicians to run the proverbial in a brewery. They've either been incredibly stupid when they told us that nobody could have foreseen this crash, or they've been manipulating the truth. I don't think you get to the top in politics by being stupid. "This is the end of boom and bust Britain" we were told. So the last decade was steady growth was it Gordon?

So here we are, poised at the top of the climb and ready to take the first drop on the roller-coaster of "global financial crisis". A drop bigger than any previously. Nobody really knows what's going to happen so theories and proposed solutions are flying all over the place.

Myself, I think it all comes down to time. I've realised the truth of the expression time is money. Simplistically, if I work for three hours now I can pay you to do three hours worth of something for me later down the line. If I borrow money now, I will have to work for it later. Collectively, we've been living off the proceeds of credit for the last ten years and we now have a debt of time to pay. The economy will have to catch up with where we are and during that time our quality of life will suffer. We've had the good times, now it's time to pay back what we owe.

It's not all bleak though, there's a rerun of the Flintstones on Cartoon Network in five minutes.

** Please note, I am not an economist (or a writer). Failure to ignore my opinions may result in serious financial losses. **