Cerrie Burnell

I have been following the discusson about the cBeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell who is missing a hand - I gather from birth rather than throungh amputation - and am appalled about the attitude of some parents - apparently 9 have complained that she scares the toddlers

Anyway I feel strongly about this: you see I AM disabled - with an above-knee amputation of my right leg. Now I would be the first to say that a missing leg is much less obvious than an amputated arm but there have been numerous occaisions when I do not wear my prosthesis - for example going swimming.

To be honest I would much much prefer kids looking at me, saying (as kids do when stating the bleeding obvious!) “you have one leg!” or “Mister - what happened to your leg?” (to which the answer “got eaten by a tiger” normally get “really? wow!!”) to parents hissing at the kids - “its rude to stare” or some such rubbish as if the parents will squash the kids curiosity.

I would much prefer children to get used to the fact that disablity exists rather than having it hidden away under a bush.

My own kids - having grown up with me - are not fazed at all about any form of disability.

Worcester and Gaza ...

I always felt that the idea of town twinning was to exchange various ideas - school visits, musical and cultural communications and the rest - in order the find out more about how other parts of the world live.

Now as an idea that is a brilliant idea until it is used in a crass, ludicrous way - which is precisely what happened in Worcester today: "Worcester may twin with war-torn Gaza"

Apart from the crassness of such an idea (the conflict is one that has been going on and off for decades and to sort out the rights and wrongs of that conflict is so complicated that it will go on and on) what bugs me is that it came from Alan Amos - a man who has only represented a Worcester ward since May last year and who has an - how can I say this? - colourful and allegedly scandalous past, who has turncoated from being a right-wing hang 'em flog 'em MP into a local labour councillor - who seems to be using this almost like a cynical publicity stunt.

Mercifully the reaction from the locals has been almost exclusively an embarrassed laughter - and in some cases outrage.

Anyway ... fancy an exchange trip to Gaza?

Reckon that some of the kids from Elgar Technology College could do more damage that the Israelis ....

Ivan Cameron

I remember clearly my family's distress at the death of my niece from cancer at the age of 3.

My deepest sympathy to the Camerons.

Stop these bloody health warnings ...

Enough, enough ... "one drink a week can cause you cancer" For God's sake - we are not immortal, we will die of something sometime - whether we like it or not.

Now I am not advocating taking up smoking again, or shoving junk food into everyone (those a BIG killers) but a lot of these health warnings are marginal (remember the true statistical cliche that "correlation does not necessarily equal causation") and frankly they impact in a political way far far more than they deserve.

I wish that a lot of these health paranoids will basically just bugger off and let us live our lives in a sensible way without having us having some bloody Dr Big Brother criticising us for every action we take.

There is a punch line to a joke that I always liked:

A doctor tells a man to give up drink, television, women etc etc ..

"Will I live longer? No, just will seem like it ...."

And not the the only tits on view

are government ministers ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVjKLeP9xDM

About 1 min 50 sec in ...

Stella Rimington

It really is something when the former head of the Security Services comes forwards and says that the UK is moving into a police state.

She said that the government is using people's fear of terrorism to damage civil liberties.

I suppose that Jackboot Smith will come up with some nonsense but I fear that Dame Stella is right.

Submarine accident

I can't see why the MoD should be too embarrased by HMS Vanguard hitting the French sub Le Triomphant somewhere in the Atlantic as the BBC defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt suggests here.

These boats are designed to be stealthy and basically to hide in a hole in the ocean. The fact that the two subs collided basically indicates that their anti-sonar devices worked - perfectly and did what precisely they were designed to do; mercifully no-one was hurt in the incident and there was no nuclear leak.

I cannot see (unless someone was negligent) how any blame at all can be assigned to the captains of either boats.

That match - and thanks

Well England lost, but after a far far better performance than against Italy -discipline needs urgent looking at (two yellow cards is not good enough) - but it was a cracking match to watch, full of pace and excitement (I suspect that there were some nervous Welsh fans towards the end).

What made it especially good was watching the match in Wales, following an excellent meal of home-grown (literally) lamb and with great company.

Thanks Rob and Karen for an excellent day .....

Sam ... That stein I owe you .. get up here to the Cardinal's Hat and it would be a pleasure to buy.

Geek update....

1234567887 seconds since the epoch
1234567888 seconds since the epoch
1234567889 seconds since the epoch
1234567890 seconds since the epoch

The big match ....

One of the joys of attending a Welsh University was watching the intensity of the passion for the England-Wales match. I was lucky in that I went to Aberystwyth towards the end of the great Welsh ascendancy during the 1970s when they were all conquering with some of the most gifted players of all time.

The television room was always packed with mainly Welsh supporters, who were generous (not surprising I suppose since they beat England for the 3 years that I was there) and my love of rugby really started then.

Although an English supporter, I always have a soft spot for Welsh rugby and so tomorrow will be a big day for me ...

The whole family are decending upon an ex-colleague who live up the Garw Valley north of Bridgend, where will I be cheering on (a probably doomed) England but there will also be a lot of friendship watching the game we both love.

Unix Time

A rare nerdy post!

At precisely 23:31:30 UTC tomorrow all the Unix internal clocks (assuming they are right!) will be showing 1234567890 :-)


This little piece of perl shows the current number of seconds since the Unix epoch (1 Jan 1970 from which all Unix clocks start their ticks!)

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $clock=scalar time() ;
print "$clock seconds since the epoch \n"

or if you are feeling really really sad ... this bit of C

#include < stdio.h >
#include < time.h >
int main(void) {
time_t currtime;
currtime=time(NULL) ;
printf("%d seconds since the epoch\n",currtime);
return 0 ;
}

(Hat tip - Chris!)

Happy Birthday

Shropshire is probably one of the most rural counties in England and is not known for producing someone who without a doubt has been one of the greatest influences upon human thought in the last 150 years.

So it is justifiable that celebrations about the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth have been held around the world, including at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which by a nice coincidence opened today in Chicago and has as one its themes "Our Planet and Its Life: Origins and Futures" which celebrates the anniversary.

Evolution, and its mechanism, first propounded by Darwin and Wallace, has been constantly upgraded and enhanced especially in the last 30 years when the molecular basis of heredity has been discovered and enhanced. The facts of evolution at all levels are now confirmed at all levels - from fossil records and more recently by the use of molecular taxonomy - the study and comparisons of DNA and proteins between species which allows phylogenetic trees to be created.


Evolution is one of the most profound thoughts to have been found by man and I am proud that Darwin came from the same county as me.

Bob Piper

Bloody hell ! I agree with Bob Piper (whose normally idea of a post is to go into an automatic "bash the Tories" mode which is just boring) but here he has a fair point.

Geert Wilders

I haven't seen the film Fitna - nor do I especially want to - but the banning of its creator Geert Wilders from the UK raises some extremely disturbing concerns.

Firstly there has been the attitude of Lord Ahmed - who will probably be spending some time in the near future as a guest of Her Majesty following a conviction for dangerous driving - who has basically intimidated the House of Lords into cancelling the showing of the film at the HoL by threatening to "personally mobilise 10,000 Muslims to prevent Wilders from entering the Upper House " (Melanie Phillips in the Spectator) which shows a contempt for the freedom of our Parliamentary institutions that is beyond belief.

Secondly, Wilders, for all of his unpleasant far-right politics, is a member of the legislature of another EU state - the Netherlands and leads a legitimate party. It comes to a pretty pass when we ban Dutch MPs from the UK.

Thirdly, this shows appeasement by the Home Office, something which is beginning to become a habit at the moment, probably caused by the worst Home Secretary for years.

Finally, I suspect that the BNP will make their odious hay with this.

Jacqui Smith

It looks as if Jacqui Smith will be exonerated - and rightly so. The issue is not whether she mlked the system - and frankly she did - but she was able to do that because the rules allowed her to do so. Apparently the word of an MP is taken on trust (I suppose that they are all honorable people) which means that the system has none of the financial checks and questioning which would be imposed (especially when dealing with such large amounts of money) elsewhere in the public or private sectors.

The system of the financial rewardng of MPs needs a complete overhaul - I personnally would massively increase MPs pay BUT withdraw most of the "extras" that become so open to abuse.

Christopher Booker and Darwin

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a journalist who knows nothing about science talks absolute bollocks on scientific matters.

Last week it was Charles Moore; today it is Christopher Booker ....

His article on Darwin & evolution - here - shows how little he knows about the subject and how little he wants to learn.

His example of the evolution of the wing and a mouse's forelegs is just plain wrong ....

That travel database ...

Apart from it being a further intolerable intrusion into our liberties, I don't have really too many concerns about it. You see the government's record of running IT projects is so diabolical that I really can't see it being any near completion before the Tories get in to power. The only thing is that God alone knows how much dosh will be wasted on it before the plug is pulled....

Foreign Workers

I have been watching the spreading strikes across the country concerning the use of foreign workers in the construction industry with a wry smile. You see, there is one British industry that has been decimated by the use of off-shore workers and virtually no one has raised an eyebrow.

The use of off-shore IT workers has absolutely savaged the British industry - an industry that is at the cutting edge of the technology and cannot be thought of as obsolete .

The workers are not actually physically present in this country - but with modern telecommunications that doesn't matter and they might as well be. Workers in India and China already login to computers in the UK, developing and testing software which means they directly challenge British workers for jobs.

What educated people should know about science

In a rather shallow article here, Charles Moore pontificates about Darwin and Christianity. Now I am not going to attack the article but just consider his shocking statement near the beginning "I am shockingly ignorant of science".

I find it extraordinary to find that a highly educated Cambridge graduate who went on to become the editor of the Daily Telegraph is showing such ignorance. Surprisingly the reverse isn't true: some of the most cultured, well read people I have met have been scientists and doctors: for instance the surgeon who operated upon my leg was an avid reader of US military history and was surprised to find me reading the same book as he was.

So what is it about science?

There are enough popular books on science that should be accessible for the arts graduates ( Dawkins's "The Ancestor's Tale" is an example or James Watson's "DNA: The Secret of Life" plus anything by Steven Pinker ) but for some reason people like Charles Moore seem unwilling to read them.

The overwhelming majority of the upper echelons of the British political and journalistic world are arts graduates and I suspect that the ignorance of science is endemic throughout that world.

So an idea: we see all over the place lists like "100 places to see before you die" ... so I propose a list of basic science and mathematical facts that all educated people know:

• Proof of Pythagoras (not just a^2+b^2=c^2)
• The names of the 4 bases that make up the DNA ladder
• Basic ideas of the Quantum Theory
  
• Big Bang Theory
  
• Modern Evolutionary theory - nothing too heavy!

I am not talking about deep knowledge - almost a bluffers guide in fact but people should know it ... and not admit that they are "Shockingly ignorant of science"

More ideas please!

Mathematics .....

There is no question of the fact that mathematics teaching is in some form of crisis - although the shortage of specialist maths teachers has been fundamental to this problem - but watching David Cameron and Carol Vorderman frolic in the snow following the announcement of her chairing of a maths task force brings to mind what should be the point of maths teaching? Unlike say, physics, some maths is essential to people's day-to-day lives.

The vast majority of students will never need (or probably want !) to move beyond the basics of arithmetic (or the other disciplines) but some is essential for daily life. But mathematics is also a stunning academic subject in its own right but the teaching of the subject is not designed to feed itself into a more academic A level.

Wondering whether there ought to be a Maths certificate which means that a person has got fundamentals and will not be fazed by the numbers that they will meet in ordinary life - or jobs .

But there should be a chance for people who want to study maths as a subject to go down the more academic path ... feeding into say the binomial theorem, calculus, statistics....