All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
beliefs, personal

Simple Formula for Living

I happened on this somewhere on the intertubes the other day. Though undoubtedly not easy – each one of us will find different parts hard – one could do a lot worse than follow these precepts.

Simple Formula for Living

Live beneath your means.
Return everything you borrow.
Stop blaming other people.
Admit it when you make mistake.
Give clothes not worn to charity.
Do something nice and try not to get caught.
Listen more; talk less.
Every day take a 30 minute walk.
Strive for excellence, not perfection.
Be on time. Don’t make excuses.
Don’t argue. Get organized.
Be kind to unkind people.
Let someone cut ahead of you in line.
Take time to be alone.
Cultivate good manners.
Be humble.
Realise and accept that life isn’t fair.
Know when to keep your mouth shut.
Go an entire day without criticising anyone.
Learn from the past. Plan for the future.
Live in the present.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
It’s all small stuff.

amusements

Ten Things

Something different for this month’s Ten Things …

Ten Fish which are also Surnames:

  1. Roach
  2. Rudd
  3. Pike
  4. Salmon
  5. Herring
  6. Sturgeon (pictured right)
  7. Pollock
  8. Parr
  9. Whiting
  10. Grayling
environment, food+drink

How to Use Less Plastic

We all know that plastic is not very biodegradable, and thus an environmental nightmare, as well as being over-used in many instances. Equally we all know how convenient it can be.

The other day I can across Less Plastic, and their poster of 9 Tips for Living with Less Plastic. Although it’s a couple of years old, I share them here with comments on how well I think we do.

  1. Bring your own shopping bag. Already do this and have done for some years.
  2. Carry a reusable water bottle. As we don’t carry water, we can’t do this. Although we could stop buying mineral water in plastic bottles for use at home.
  3. Bring your own cup. We almost never have take-out coffee etc., so not much point in this.
  4. Pack your lunch in reusable containers. Again we don’t carry packed lunch, so this isn’t appropriate.
  5. Say no to disposable straws and cutlery. Yep, always do if we can.
  6. Skip the plastic produce bags. Difficult if the supermarket offers no alternative to having 29 onions floating loose in your trolley – they can provide paper bags for bread so why not for other produce? Would they like us taking our own paper bags? And then there’s the question of what to use in the freezer.
  7. Slow down and dine in. We seldom eat out; maybe once or twice a month, on average.
  8. Store leftovers in glass jars. Yes, could do this although I’m ot sure about finding a good variety of different sized jars with out buying then specially. And anyway we have lots of plastic boxes and wouldn’t it be greener to use them to destruction first?
  9. Share these tips with your friends. That’s just what I’m doing!

So how well do you do?

environment, history, links, medical, science, sexuality

Monthly Interesting Links

As regular readers will realise, I read a lot of articles in consumer science, consumer history and the more general media over the course of a month – articles which look as if they will interest me. (I don’t generally read politics, business etc.). What I post here are only those items which I think may be of more general interest to you, my readers, being mindful that the humanities people amongst you might want a bit of “soft” science; and the scientists a bit of humanities. So I do try to mostly avoid difficult science and academically dense Eng.Lit. or history – ‘cos you don’t all want to struggle with/be interested in that, though some may. And I obviously don’t expect everyone to read everything, but just to pick the items which interest you most; if you find one or two each month then that’s good.

So, having restated my aims for this series, let’s get down to business – because there is a lot to cover this month.

Science, Technology & Natural World

We start off with something which surprised me: the engineers building Crossrail had to take the curvature of the Earth into account, because of the length of the line and the precision with which some of the tunnels had to be threaded through between existing structures.

Staying on an engineering theme, scientists have developed a method of making wood as strong as steel, and thus potentially useable as a high strength building material.

Changing themes, what really is biodiversity and why is it so important?

The curious history of horses’ hooves, and how five digits became just one.

Following the attack on a pair of Russians in Salisbury, several of the scientific media have been asking what nerve agents are and how they work. This is Scientific American‘s view.

Health & Medicine

A strange, six inch long, “mummy” was found in Chile some years ago, and many people decided it was an alien – hardly surprising given its appearance. However, following DNA testing it has finally been confirmed that it was a very deformed, female, human infant.

Musician Taylor Muhl has a large birthmark on her torso, but it turns out that it isn’t a birthmark but that she’s a chimera, having absorbed a twin sister in utero in the very early days of gestation.

Influenza is relatively common, and benign, in may non-primate species which provide a natural reservoir for the virus. And there are many other such viruses out in the wild which are a concern as (like Ebola, Zika, SARS) they could mutate and jump to humans.

On a similar theme, researchers are coming to realise that there is a genetic component to our susceptibility to many diseases and that disease prevalence partly depends on the genetic mutations we carry.

Sexuality

From consent advice to sex toys and masturbation hacks, YouTube has taken over sex education.

Language

While on sex, the Whores of Yore website has a history of Cunt, the word.

History, Archaeology & Anthropology

Researchers have analysed a huge number of DNA samples to discover that Homo sapiens interbred with Denisovans on multiple occasions, as we did with the Neanderthals.

Why did Oxford and Cambridge have a monopoly on UK university education for several hundred years, when universities proliferated across the rest of Europe?

Long before the height of the slave trade and the British Empire, black Africans lived freely in Tudor England.

In 1600 Giordano Bruno burned at the stake as a heretic and it looks likely that this was for believing in the existence of planets outside our solar system.

The oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia.

London

Mudlarking: the pursuit of archaeological treasures hiding in the mud of the River Thames foreshore. Warning: you need a licence!

John Joseph Merlin, a wizard in Georgian London.

Lifestyle & Personal Development

Brad Warner, one of our two favourite Zen Masters, on waking up happy.

So just how many beak-ups does one have to have before one finds “the one”? Search me!

The exorcists are coming, and it doesn’t look good.

We’re living through a crisis of touch where lots of basic human contact like hugging is no longer acceptable – and it is having a serious effect on our mental health.

OK guys, this is for you: 100 easy ways to make women’s lives better. Basically: be considerate!

Finally, following on from the above two items, an article I found rather nauseating about the supposed crisis in modern masculinity. Gawdelpus all!

More next month! Meanwhile, be good!

current affairs, ramblings

It’s not Cricket, or is it?

So, a couple of Aussies have been banned for tampering with the match ball.

This should not be a surprise, except that they were using an artificial aid to do so – which, however tempting, is frankly stupid as well as cheating. And they got caught.

Ball doctoring goes on in cricket at all levels, it is very easy and it isn’t new.

Some dust on the hand can easily rough up one side of the ball, as can boot studs or a fingernail, while shining the other side with hair gel to help the ball swing. Shining the ball on the trousers/shirt/handkerchief is legal. Using hair gel, dust, fingernails or studs isn’t.

It is also very easy to lift the seam with just a thumbnail and some sleight of hand while (allegedly) removing dirt from the seam. Removing the dirt is legal but lifting the seam isn’t.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I was never more than a jobbing club third XI cricketer, and yet I was shown some of the techniques on more than one occasion. I never doctored a ball during a match – I wasn’t good enough that it would have made any useful difference anyway – nor did I ever spot it happening when I was umpiring, but I did use it to prolong the useful life of practice balls.

food+drink, medical

Eating and Diets

Here’s an interesting article, originally from New York Magazine, by a couple of specialists on nutrition which explodes many of the myths around diets etc. In their preamble they say:

It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the “right” way to eat.

Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.

With that in mind, we offered friends, readers, and anyone else we encountered one simple request: Ask us anything at all about diet and nutrition and we will give you an answer that is grounded in real scientific consensus, with no “healthy-ish” chit-chat, nary a mention of “wellness”, and no goal other than to cut through all the noise and help everyone see how simple it is to eat well.

The article itself is a long read, but very illuminating.

quotes

Quotes

Here’s this month’s selection of quotes, various, for your delectation.

That gay free-thinker, a fine talker once,
What turns him now a stupid silent dunce?
Some God, or spirit he has lately found;
Or chanc’d to meet a minister that frown’d.
Judge we by nature? Habit can efface,
Interest o’ercome, or policy take place:
By action? those uncertainty divides:
By passions? These dissimulation hides:
Find, if you can, in what you cannot change.
Manner with fortunes, humours turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times.
[Alexander Pope (1688-1744); Moral Essays, Epistle I]

The great generational divide today is between those who know where they are going and how to get there, and those who know how to enter an address onto their phone.
[Terry Cowan]

Shall I compare thee to a blinkered dog?
Thou hast been lied to by the wealthy pack,
Tough truths do shake the Brexit facts of Mogg
And Nigel’s speech is all too short on fact.
Sometimes too hot the air of Boris seems,
And often is his tousled brain confused;
Though every prophet plays upon your dreams
With rhetoric, or twisted argument abused.
But Europe’s constant peacetime will not fade
Nor lose the vision of cohesive might,
Nor shall Gove brag of benefits to trade
When single markets are so obviously right.
   So long as voters breathe they’ll counter May,
   So long lives Europe – better with UK.
[Bernard Stacey]

Mary had a little lamb
It ran into a pylon
10,000 volts went up it’s arse
And turned it’s wool to nylon.

1. Apologize to children when you are wrong.
2. Do not assume you’re smarter than a child simply because you’re older.
3. Say thank you to children when they do something for you or others.
4. Admit when you’ve made a mistake and admit it openly to them.
5. Listen to children.
[@BEautifully_C on Twitter]

We schoolmasters must always temper discretion with deceit.
[Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall]

The EU Single Market was largely completed for goods by 1992 but development remains on-going with regard to services. The Single Market enables free movement of goods but also of people, services and capital … It is [a] type of enhanced free-trade area in which goods move freely, but so do services, investment and people. To achieve this … the EU needs to get involved in harmonising regulations across the single market. This is why there are much-maligned rules on, for instance, the efficiency of vacuum cleaners across the EU. In the absence of such regulations there would be a regulatory race-to-the-bottom: countries would compete to produce the cheapest-possible vacuum cleaner across the EU, sacrificing safety in the process. It also explains why there is free movement of people: this allows for the exchange of typically non-tradable goods, such as plumbing.
[http://obiterj.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/trade-bill-vague-amendment.html]

We are just something the sun does to chemicals if you leave it for a few billion years.
[Brad Warner]

The blithe confidence of the British Establishment, which believes that, through bluster, aggression and talking loudly at foreigners, it can achieve anything, however unlikely
[George Monbiot]

The more I look at Brexit, the more it looks like the Iraq War. No one in power can explain why it’s necessary, no one knows how to pull it off, and no one knows how to get out when it goes horribly wrong.
[George Monbiot]

Exciting perks of adulthood:
1. Busy! Busy all the time! What are you even doing? You don’t know!
2. Very tired.
3. Some kinda stomach ache???
4. Definitely sad about something.
5. Bills! Bills all the time! What are you even paying for? You don’t know!
@marcformarc

The Yogacara school [of Buddhism] doesn’t believe that everything in the universe is all in the mind. Not exactly. But they do believe that whatever we know of the universe comes through our minds. They believe there’s no such thing as objective knowledge. This doesn’t exactly mean there’s no objective Truth. Just that we can’t really see the truth as it is without it being coloured by our mental processes. They, therefore, believe that the study of the workings of the mind is the most direct way to understand the universe in which we find ourselves.
[Brad Warner; http://hardcorezen.info/dancing-with-libtards-and-fascists/5778]

What are we to think about witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, 20 or 30 at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive?
[Malleus Maleficarum (1487)]

I have just come across (pun intended) an article for women on how to have better orgasms, which includes the phrases “Sacred Feminine Energy”, “be a goddess”, “awaken your sacral chakra”, “learn ecstatic breathing”, but at no point does it say “wank more”. I GIVE UP.
[Zoe Margolis]

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
[Stephen Hawking]

Thinking how space-time used to be is like a fish trying to imagine steam.
[Dr Daniele Oriti, Max Planck Institute, Germany]

I think the use of time machines will have to be strictly controlled. Because as soon as lots of people have time machines, things will start getting really crazy.
[Brad Warner]

[A]utomation comes for us all eventually. Witness the birth of Goob, the computer-assisted lifestyle magazine from Botnik.org. By training a predictive text generator on a library of material from Goop, Botnik was able to produce an even more adventurous brand. Goob subscribers can browse products such as Chicago Dad Soothing Mortgage Advice Salve (“get back to the realm of your own essence”) and “Cancer Gossip Jeans”, all wrapped up in bold headlines such as “Is the soul more supple when you’ve been divorced? We asked two dogs for some advice.”
[Feedback, New Scientist, 17/03/2018]

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
[Groucho Marx]

medical

Flusurvey

I now seem to be recovering from a heavyweight bout with this year’s flu; I’ve lost most of the last 10 days and still have a sore throat and cough, so I’m not yet out of the woods. This is despite having had my flu jab last autumn.

But we know that this year’s vaccine hasn’t been as effective as usual. That’s for two reasons, both (this year) relating mostly to the nasty A-H3N2 virus:
(a) The virus for the vaccine is picked some 9 months in advance because it takes that long to manufacture the vaccine. (So the stains for next winter’s flu jab have probably already been fixed and production started.) In the meantime the strain circulating in the wild may well have mutated, meaning the vaccine isn’t fully effective.
(b) Researchers have recently realised that the virus can also mutate during the production process, so even if what’s circulating in the wild remains fixed again the vaccine isn’t a perfect match.
That is bad news because not only does it look as if both are happening, but A-H3N2 is an especially nasty flu strain; in years where it is circulating there is always an up-tick in cases. H3N2 is the so-called Aussie flu as it is what was circulating in the Antipodes during their last winter (our summer).

Because of the way in which flu works, each year’s vaccine contains three or four different strains. Usually two Influenza-A strains (this year an H1N1 and H3N2) and one or two Influsenza-B strains (this year a B/Brisbane strain in the normal trivalent vaccine, with the quadrivalent vaccine adding a B/Phuket strain). B strains are generally less common and less virulent; A strains can be very nasty viruses, especially for the elderly and those with co-morbidities (like diabetes and COPD).

That’s a very simplified explanation of flu and what’s happening; there’s a very full explanation on Wikipedia. And it is really an aside. What I came here today to tell you about is Flusurvey.

Flusurvey is an online system for measuring influenza trends; it is owned by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Public Health England. The UK Flusurvey was launched in July 2009 during the swine flu epidemic and is part of a Europe-wide initiative to monitor influenza-like activity and understand how epidemics spread. Flusurvey collects data directly from the general public (rather than via hospitals or GPs) during the flu season (so roughly October to April). This is important because many people with flu don’t visit a doctor so wouldn’t otherwise feature in traditional flu surveillance.

Anyone who lives in the UK can register to take part. When you register you are asked to complete a short profile of general questions about yourself and your flu risk factors (eg. age, vaccination status). Then each week you’ll be asked to report any flu-like symptoms experienced since your last visit – and you’ll get to see a map of reported flu in your area (by postcode area – the first 3 or 4 characters of your postcode). Participation is entirely voluntary and information is collected for research purposes only; all analysis is carried out on anonymous datasets.

Of course, if you’re sad, like me, you can look at the map, and pages of graphs and statistics, at any time to see where the hotspots are: looking as I write this I see that my area of west London is currently quite warm as are Ilford, SE Wales and the Harrogate area of Yorkshire. I can also see that there was a massive spike in flu cases starting at Christmas and lasting about 4 weeks; so the worst now looks to be over at least taking the country as a whole.

Currently Flusurvey has over 4000 registered participants with about 2500 reporting in each week – which is heavily weighted towards London and the South-East.

I have been completing Flusurvey each week for a number of years and given that it normally takes 2 minutes a week it is a quick, painless and free way of contributing to ongoing research. So if you have half an ounce of altruism, or are just generally nosy about what’s going on, it is worth signing up. If you sign up now, then you will be included in the remainder of this year’s survey and will be in pole position when Flusurvey starts up again next autumn.