I veganised a recipe handed down from my mum, and it's great. It's a lovely moist cake, keeps for a good while, and easy to make from mostly store-cupboard ingredients.

The most exotic thing involved is the ingredient that I used to replace egg: chia seed. You can also try flax seed. This other website has a nice guide on how to make "chia egg" or "flax egg" - there is something in these seeds that makes a glutinous substance that can bind a cake together.

The end result is great. Compared against the non-vegan version there's a different texture - the edge of the cake is chewy/crispy in a nice way, I find.

• 225g (8 oz) dark soft brown sugar
• 180ml (6 fl oz) vegetable oil
• 3 "chia eggs" (made from 3 tbsp chia seeds, plus about 6 tbsp water)
• 150g (6 oz) self-raising flour
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 large carrots, coarsely grated
• 50g (2 oz) chopped walnuts
• A handful (about 6) dates, roughly chopped [optional]

First prepare the chia egg: grid the chia seeds in a pestle and mortar, mix the water in, and leave it to stand for a few minutes while you do the other things.

Line an 18cm (7 inch) round cake tin with greased greaseproof paper, and preheat the oven to 180ºC (350ºF, gas mark 4).

Put the sugar into a mixing bowl and gradually whisk in the oil, then whisk the eggs in one at a time (easier to get them mixed in smoothly that way). Add the flour, cinnamon and baking powder and stir the mixture well, beating out lumps to make the mixture as smooth as you can. Add the carrots, nuts, and dates, and mix.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 1 hour 10 minutes, until the cake is risen and firm to the touch.

Remove from the oven, leave to stand in the tin for 3 minutes, then turn out onto a wire tray, peel off the paper and leave to cool.

This evening, took the time to make a nice mushroom and aubergine biryani. It takes a little time to prepare the onions and the marinade, but this method cooks the rice beautifully and makes a great one-pot dish.

Serves 2. The recipe here is based on a biryani recipe in "Indian vegetarian cookery" by Rafi Fernandez (p109). - And if you're wondering if 2 onions is too much for 2 people, well I wondered too, so I checked it against three other recipes before I tried it. It is indeed the right amount!

For the marinade:

• 80g yogurt
• Juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1 tbsp garam masala
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed

Plus:

• 2 medium white onions
• 1/2 an aubergine (chopped into thin bitesize pieces)
• 120g mushrooms (chopped into mediumthickish pices)
• 155g basmati rice (ideally the rice with wild rice in too)
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp cumin seed
• About 8-10 strands saffron
• 1 handful coriander leaf, chopped
• 2 tbsp oat milk

Fry the aubergine pieces in not-too-much oil, just a touch - just to get a bit of colour on them.

With a fork, beat the yoghurt with the other marinade ingredients in a decent-sized bowl. Toss the mushroom and aubergine in this paste, making sure they're covered well, and leave to marinate for at least 20 minutes - could be much longer if you like.

Slice the onions into 5mm halfmoons, and fry them in hot oil for up to 10 minutes to crispy. Drain them on kitchen paper.

Rinse the rice. Parboil the rice (5 mins) with bay leaf, cinnamon, cumin seed and saffron. Then drain it and run the cold tap over it a little to stop it cooking. Don't do too much, no need to wash the flavour away.

In a pan with a tight-fitting lid, put a glug of oil and/or butter. Spread it around to make sure the bottom of the pan is coated. Now place a small scattering of rice, then the mushrooms+aubergine in a layer. Then half of the remaining rice, followed by most of the fried onions as a new layer (keep some fried onion for garnish), and finally the rest of the rice. Pour the milk over the top, gently making sure you get it evenly all over.

Now put the pan on the heat. Turn the heat down to the lowest it can go, and put the lid on. Let it cook gently for about 40 minutes - do not stir it ever, and do not open the lid.

To serve - turn the contents of the pan out onto a plate. Garnish with the leftover fried-onion, and coriander leaves.

Free markets? Democracy? High or low taxes? ... We're in an era when lots of commentators are in favour of "let the market decide". I was struck by this, funnily enough, when looking at the much-blogged and much-discussed opinions of Dominic Cummings. His writing has plenty of interesting detail, and a good understanding of technology, and of course there's plenty to agree with or disagree with. This is the quote that struck me:

"Economic theory, practice, and experiment have undermined the basis for Cartesian central planning: decentralised coordination via market prices is generally a better method for dealing with vast numbers of possibilities than Cartesian or Soviet planning, though obviously markets have problems particularly with monetary policy and financial regulation."

These aren't the problems that come to mind when I think of market mechanisms. The more fundamental are democracy, and equality of opportunity. You don't need to "pick a side" (not even the left side) in order to agree that market mechanisms have a "rich get richer" outcome baked into their core. "The rich get richer" is not an axiom, but it's an unavoidable consequence and inseparable from the processes that make markets "efficient".

By the way - "efficient", here, means that prices in the market reflect all available information about the values of the things in that market. Informally, it's the claim that markets are the best way of deciding what to do, once you've written down what value you attach to things and outcomes.

The claimed efficiency of markets has been a long-running debate. What we can see from recent history, though, is that the "free market" idea does generally seem to be effective in the sense that once you've set the rules of the market, all the different actors in that market (people, businesses, investors) play their part and it all adds up to produce something like the designed outcome. There's lots to criticise about markets, in particular "negative externalities" (bad things that aren't factored into the pricing - e.g. CO2 emissions), but let's not get into that right now. We should recognise the important core appeal: essentially, a market system is a way to loosely coordinate the brains of all concerned in finding an optimal outcome, and this is its key advantage over "central planning" in which we have to rely on the brains of whoever's in the central planning authority.

The fundamental democratic problem with free markets is as follows. They lead to an outcome that reflects value, but the actors involved don't all end up with the same treatment. Some get rich, some get poor. (See "Free market pros and cons".) They then have different amounts of leverage within that market: some have lots of power, some have very little. In some markets that's fine, but in anything that involves actual citizens, it's a recipe for inequality. We can tax profits, we can tax capital, and that's important so that at the very least, governments can provide essential services and a social safety net. But people on the economic right don't like such taxes, arguing that they reduce the incentives for market players and thus act as a drag on market efficiency.

Hence we arrive at the basic philosophical conflict between the economic right and the economic left. Market efficiency versus democratic fairness.

-

Now into that picture comes this other idea that has been in the ether for at least the past decade: universal basic income. Universal basic income (UBI) simply means giving a sum of money to every citizen, e.g. a lump of money every month or every year. It's unconditional - it doesn't matter if you're employed or not, for example.

There are various motivations for UBI, but one is that this is a much more efficient use of government money than the current alternative: a complex tangle of benefits, each with its own bureaucratic eligibility criteria, and the tangled benefits system leading to strange undesired outcomes. For example, unemployment benefits can often mean that some people end up losing money by accepting a low-paid job offer. In the world of UBI, there's no disincentive: accept the job if you want it, and you get extra income as well as your UBI.

UBI has been debated plenty during the 2010s. It has its advocates on the left and on the right. And its critics: critics on the right ask "but who's going to pay for it all?" and "wouldn't people just stop working and start freeloading?", while critics on the left ask "isn't this a right-wing excuse to slash the welfare state?"

Although there may be some well-reasoned criticism out there, I want to return to the fundamental issues. We have big debates and disagreements about how to organise our societies. We want the outcomes to be efficient as well as fair. We have many people passionately wedded to socialism, and many people passionately wedded to market mechanisms. The fundamental political question is, how do we get from here, to some better situation?

UBI seems to be one answer. Not just one answer - it's the only answer I know of that could appeal to people of many shades of the political spectrum, and is also something that can be tried, can be piloted within our existing countries without having to rewrite or dismantle decades of complex policy. The key is that UBI directly resolves the conflict between market mechanisms and fairness. It doesn't fix everything (negative externalities, for example), but it allows us to move to a situation where democrats and market fundamentalists can work together to produce efficient outcomes for all.

I know there are many implementation details of UBI to talk about, and I'm sure there are some imperfections in general. But can we afford to dither about the details, when we have so many problems to solve, and so many winners and losers from the current economic systems in place around the world?

Inspired by my recent trip to India, tried some more Indian cookery tonight.

The main lesson I learnt this time was about amchoor - a powder made from sun-dried green mangoes.

Ah no, the main lesson was actually how to eat curry one-handed using a chapati. But I've definitely not mastered that one yet.

Anyway amchoor has a nice clear flavour and is used in some Indian cuisine to add fruity zestiness to a dish without making the dish too wet. The top hit from this evening's meal was amchoor chana (chickpeas with mango powder). An otherwise simple chickpea curry is made zingy by a generous teaspoon per person of amchoor cooked in.

I'd like to get better at dhals too. Although a basic dhal is easy - just simmer some lentils/pulses for a while, with some spice - I haven't got the hang of the different types of pulses and how you'd use them. Here we were using a recipe which called for a mix of half red lentils, and half mung dal (mung beans). It gave a good gloopy texture.

My thanks to Samira Agnihotri, who kindly gave me some home-made amchoor!

For anyone trying Veganuary this year, or just working out how to cook vegan more often, here are my tips of some handy recipes!

• Chilli sin carne

• African peanut stew

• Tofu scramble - really surprising how nice this is. It's a replacement for scrambled egg - of course you can tell the difference, it's totally different - but you might like it as much as I do. Warm a little bit of oil in a pan. Add a pack of tofu (drained) and use your spatula to break it up into rough pieces. Add a splash of oat milk, and a generous teaspoon per person of turmeric, and continue to stir it around and break it up until it's in scrambled-egg-sized pieces. Near the end of cooking, add a sprinkle of nutritional yeast ("yeast flakes"). Serve on bread/toast just like you would scrambled eggs.

• Fake fish and chips - easy and popular

• Two easy mushroom tarts

• Pad thai - watch the video!

• Sticky shiitake mushrooms (quick)

• Beetroot wellington - a bit more involved, for a Sunday lunch.

...and for more convenience: Vivera's meat-like things are great (shawarma), and Taifun's tofu is great (the black forest flavoured one is quite sausagey, the garlic one is nice, and the basil one is good for italian)

Some Dutch phrases I've been picking up:

Grotendeels

Allemaal

Hoe heet het?

Toch

Klopt

Precies

Boomklever

Fijne jaar!

Two flat mushroomy tarts, really easy to make and vegan too. This recipe makes "half of one half of the other" but you can concentrate on just one or the other if you like.

The creamy one is a bit more savoury, while the tomato/pepper one is sweeter. They complement each other nicely.

Serves 2, takes 40 minutes (but the second half is just waiting, so you can do other things).

• One sheet of puff pastry
• 200g chestnut mushrooms
• 1 small red onion
• 1/2 orange pepper (sliced)
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• Olive oil
• 3 heaped tbsp of Oatly creme fraiche
• 5 sundried tomatoes, from a jar preserved in oil - plus some more of the oil from the jar
• 1 tsp of garlic puree, or 1 small clove garlic (pressed)

Preheat the oven to 200C, 180C fan.

Divide the pastry into two rectangular pieces, place it on a baking tray, and put something on top to weight it down a bit while it "blind bakes" in the oven. We just used some tin baking dishes (doesn't need to be too heavy). Put this in the oven and blind bake for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the toppings.

Warm up some olive oil in a large frying pan. Slice the mushrooms thickly and add them to the pan. Fry for a few minutes. Slice the red onion and add it. Fry it for another few minutes, stirring, until the onion is nicely softened.

Divide the contents of the pan in two, i.e. move half of it into a separate pan. Add the pepper to one pan, and the garlic and thyme to the other. Continue to fry a little more, but not too much. (It'd be nice to get a bit of colour on the pepper if you can.) Chop the sundried tomatoes, and add them to the pan that has the peppers.

When you take the pastry out of the oven, discard the weights on top.

On one pastry, spread the Oatly creme fraiche, and then spread on top the contents of the garlicky pan.

On the other pastry, spread the contents of the other pan. Also, take the jar of sundried tomatoes, and carefully sprinkle some of the liquid (i.e. tomato-infused oil) over the top.

Season with pepper if you like.

Bake these pastries in the oven for about 15-20 minutes.

I had a great time at the Biodiversity_next conference, meeting a lot of people involved in Biodiversity informatics. (I was part of an "AI" session discussing the state of the art in deep learning and bioacoustic audio.)

I was glad to get more familiar with the biodiversity information frameworks. GBIF is one worth knowing, an aggregator for worldwide observations of species. It's full of millions and millions of observations. Plants, animals, microbes... expert, amateur, automatic observations - lots of different types of "things spotted in the wild". They use the cutely-named "Darwin core" as a data formatting standard (informatics folks will get the joke!).

Here's my first play at downloading some GBIF data. I downloaded all the data they've got about rose-ringed parakeets in Britain - the bright green parrots that are quite a new arrival in Britain, an invasive species which we can see in many city parks now. I plotted the observations per year. I also plotted a second species on the same chart, just to have a baseline comparison. So the parakeets are plotted in green, and the other species (common sandpiper) in yellow:

Many caveats with this data. For a start, each dot represents an "observation" not an "individual" - some of the observations are of a whole flock. I chose to keep it simple, not least because some of the observations list "5000" birds at a time, which may well be true but might swamp the visualisation! Also, some of the co-ordinates are scrambled, for data-privacy reasons - you can see it in the slight grid-like layout of the dots - and some are exact.

Further, I don't think I have any way of normalising for the amount of survey effort, at least for most of the data points. There seems to be a strange spike of parakeet density in 2009 - probably due to some surveying initiative, not to some massive short-term surge in the bird numbers! I think if the numbers really had increased eight-fold and then fallen back again, someone would have said something...

Regarding "survey effort": GBIF does offer ways of indicating survey effort, and also "absences" as well as "presences", but most of the data submissions don't make use of those fields.

The sandpiper data fluctuates too. There's definitely an increase as time goes by, primarily due to the increasing amount of surveys adding to GBIF. That's why I added a comparison species. Even with that, you can clearly see the difference in distribution between the two.

My simple python plotting script is here and the source data are here: parakeet data, sandpiper data.