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.

freedom of speech, medical, science

Nanny State's Fatal Addiction

3 January 2012 Keith

A few days ago the Heresy Corner blog wrote a piece exposing the worrying tendency of officialdom and do-gooders to slam down hard on things they don’t like (eg. smoking, alcohol) but with completely the wrong timing and emphasis. The writer shows that they did it with smoking and now they’re doing it with alcohol, and suggests that it is little more then self-defeating persecution. Consider the following extracts …

Alcohol consumption in the UK in fact peaked in 2004 and has been declining ever since. It’s now 11% lower than it was. There was an especially large fall in 2009. The UK ranks also below the European average in terms of consumption, an under-reported fact that may have something to do with Britain’s having the second-highest level of alcohol duty in the EU. The fall in consumption has been most dramatic among young people (the same is true of smoking) as a combination of draconian ID-checks (these days, you’re lucky to be sold a bottle of wine no questions asked if you’re under 40), rising prices and a media obsession with teenage drunkenness has made the traditional slow transition to the adult world of social drinking far more difficult to accomplish. This, of course, may help to explain why, when they finally are allowed to drink, so many young people seem unable to handle it.

As the harm reduces, so the zeal of the harm-reducers increases, as they focus all their energy and determination on ever-smaller numbers of the recalcitrant. At the same time, new targets come into their sights.

Two media organisations in particular enjoy scaring their audience with exaggerated levels of gloom. The Daily Mail and the BBC […] It’s not just alcohol and tobacco that regularly get this level of alarmist coverage. It’s also… illegal drugs, obesity, sex-trafficking, climate change, internet porn and the “sexualisation of childhood”.

Nanny statism, of course, is what happens when the government takes the regulation of morality away from bishops and gives it to doctors, social workers and professional experts.

I would actually say that this is what happens when you take the regulation of morality away from the people themselves. What happened to the personal responsibility that this government is supposedly such a believer in?

What is just as worrying, as is pointed out by Tim Worstall at Forbes is that the numbers upon which this alcohol policy are being built are themselves a complete fiction. As Worstall points out …

[W]hat drives political action is not the truth but what people believe to be the truth. So, if you can whip up a scare story about the ill effects […] then, as long as people believe you, you should be able to get some action taken […]

“Some 1,173,386 people in England were admitted to casualty for injuries or illnesses caused by drinking in 2010/11, compared with just 510,780 in 2002/3 […] The figures for last year represent an 11 per cent increase on the previous 12 months, when alcohol-related admissions stood at 1,056,962”

[…] there are two things odd about these numbers […] The first is that no one at all is measuring how many hospital admissions are as a result of alcohol. That’s just not what is done:

“It’s largely a function of methodology. Alcohol-related admissions are calculated in such a way that if you are unlucky enough, say, to be involved in a fire and admitted to hospital for the treatment of your burns, it will count as 0.38 of an alcohol-related admission — unless you happen to be under 15, when it won’t count at all.

“If you drown, it counts as 0.34 of an alcohol-related admission […] Getting chilled to the bone (accidental excessive cold) counts for 0.25 of an admission, intentional self-harm to 0.20 per cent of an admission.

“These fractions apply whether or not there was any evidence you had been drinking before these disasters befell you.”

So […] [w]e’re not in fact being told anything at all about the number of alcohol related hospital admissions. We’re being told about the numbers which are assumed to be alcohol related. And I think we can all see what the problem is here, can’t we? […]

Now, does all of this mean that there has been no rise in alcohol related diseases? I’ve no idea actually, but the point is that nor do you and nor do the people releasing these figures to us. The methods they’re using to compile the numbers, the things they’re not telling us about those numbers, mean that they lying to us with those numbers.

So basically the whole thing is a complete and utter lie from start to finish, and the numbers could be adjusted in the background to prove anything anyone wants. And politicians wonder why no-one believes nor trusts them. Would you?

So wither next? You’d better believe that these state-registered nanny do-gooders have their sights on all the “problem areas” mentioned above. Drugs have been a target for a long time; the heavy-handed mobsters must arrive soon. They’ve started on obesity already. And as for anything to do with sex, well we must ban that because, well, it’s just not nice is it?

Next we know they’ll be wanting to grant us licences to shag. Oh wait a minute. We have those already, it’s called marriage. It’s probably as well no-one takes blind bit of notice of that any more.

So be alert … your country needs lerts! Gawdelpus!

science, thoughts

New Year, New Calendar

2 January 2012 Keith

Did you change your calendars yesterday for the bright new 2012 versions?

I bet you didn’t! At at least not to the overhauled calendar being advocated by Richard Henry and Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University in the USA, because the proposed Hanke-Henry Calendar is a bit radically different: it has a reformed pattern of two 30 day months followed by a 31 day month, four times a year. So the rhyme, “30 days hath September, April, June and November” would be revised to “30 days hath September, June, March and December”.

This means that every year would be composed of a regular 52 seven-day weeks, and every date will always fall on the same day of the week — like Christmas Day would always be, say, a Sunday. It gets rid of the silliness of leap years and of remembering how many days each moth has.

So who sees the problem? Surely if it was that easy it would have been done centuries ago.

Yes, that’s right the Hanke-Henry Calendar produces a year of just 364 days. Whereas the Earth year is 365.2422 days (hence our need for a leap day every four years to correct for that almost ¼ day error). So what do they do? Yes, that’s right! They impose not leap days, but leap weeks by adding an extra week to the end of December every 5 or 6 years. GOK how they’d cope with the moveability Easter!?

There’s another flaw, which the Scientific American article doesn’t pick up on. Hanke and Henry want their calendar to start with 1 January on a Sunday (as 2012 is, and which will next occur in 2017). The only problem is that the International Standard on dates (ISO 8601, and see also the Wikipedia entry) decrees that the week starts on a Monday and that week 1 of the year is the first week containing at least 4 days (which turns out to mean the week containing the first Thursday of the year). It’s that “week starts on a Monday” rule that is the killer. Thanks to 2012 being a Leap Year the next year when 1 January is a Monday is 2018. Hanke and Henry don’t want to wait that long! But it would give time for everyone to agree to the idea and get their ducks lined up.

It’s an interesting and actually quite a logical idea, but to be honest I cannot see it catching on. If we thought the brouhaha over Year 2000 was painful, this would be ten times worse as every date algorithm would have to be not just checked but actually changed. And in the 11 years since Year 2000 the electronic world has expanded ten-fold, maybe a hundred-fold, beyond what it was in 2000. Business would never stand for what would be a hugely complex change — although it might help the unemployment figures.

All those who’d like to try this calendar say “Aye”.

personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 7

1 January 2012 Keith

Experiment, week 7. This week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

Royal Institution Lectures. Every year for almost 200 years London’s Royal Institution has put on a series of Christmas science lectures for children. And every year for the last 30 at least they have been televised. I won’t say I have watched them every year because there have been some awful series recently, especially when they were covered by commercial television. But thankfully they’re now back on BBC TV. This year there were only three lectures; there used to be five or six. And while I won’t say they’ve been dumbed down (though they probably have) they are certainly less imaginative and with fewer useful demonstrations than they were in years gone by when people like Sir David Attenborough and Prof. Eric Laithwaite were the lecturers. But they are still worth watching, even for me as a scientist. This year’s lectures, given by Prof Bruce Hood, were all about how our mind works; they’re still available on BBC iPlayer if you want to catch them.
Parrots. I’ve written before about the Ring-Neck Parakeets which regularly visit our garden. I continue to find them an attractive, delightful and somewhat comic addition to our fauna.
Lamb Curry. Last night I cooked a nicely hot (well I did use a good quantity of Vindaloo Curry Paste!) Lamb Curry with Cauliflower; Noreen did the Lemon Rice. It was consumed with a couple of bottles of my favourite Adnams beer. I’m getting better about not over-eating and always having a second helping, but curry remains one of the things which I cannot resist overindulging in. What could be better for New Year’s Eve?
Sensible Consultants. Last Thursday I had my annual (joke — it slips by 3 months every year!) check-up at the Royal Brompton Hospital for my Obstructive Sleep Apnoea. Although I know there isn’t too much they’re ever going to do, I never look for ward to it. I’m clearly on their “stable and we don’t need to do anything” list as for the last few years I’ve been seen by a very nice Malaysian consultant nurse; but I realised she wasn’t on duty this year and wasn’t looking forward to an interview with a young know-it-all male Registrar with poor English. But I actually had a very pleasant ten minute chat with a sensible (and not unattractive) female Consultant. I do wish all consultants listened as well as she did and were as sensible and measured in their approach. Thanks, Michelle!

High Street Kensington Christmas Lights. On the way home from the Brompton Hospital on Thursday I detoured via High Street Kensington to pick up Noreen who had been shopping (for my birthday present!). And along High Street Ken there are what I think are some delightful, if subtle, Christmas lights. They’re small clusters of yellowish fairy lights hanging in the trees, for all the world looking like mistletoe growing on the trees. They would have looked even better after dark. The photo isn’t good as it was a grab shot taken through the car windscreen in failing light, but hopefully you get the rough idea. If nothing else they’re imaginatively different, and they worked for me! I also like lights in trees.

thoughts

Revisionism

1 January 2012 Keith

In looking at life, the universe and everything over the last days one of the things I’ve decided is that my blogging needs to be a bit less regimented — if only so I don’t get onto a treadmill with it.

So I’ve decided to do away with the regular “XXX of the Week” type features (where XXX is words, quotes, links, etc.). These features will still appear, just maybe a bit less regularly and not always on the same day of the week. It’ll be more when the mood or inspiration strikes me, so irregular. Hopefully that’ll leave me more spare processing power for commentary etc.

The 52 weeks photo challenge has ended, and having done it for two years I’ve decided not to take a break from it. But I do have another idea for an irregular photo series, which I hope to launch in the next week or so.

I have also streamlined the “categories” used to index posts. The previous vast list was completely unwieldy and growing like Topsy. So I’ve stripped it back to a couple of dozen categories and had a happy couple of evenings re-indexing everything. If you want to search for something particular there is always the search facility in the RH navigator.

So what’s the bottom line? Not a lot will change really. As it’s an experiment the weekly “Reasons to be Grateful” will stay as is. Otherwise everything will hopefully become a bit more flexible and a bit more diverse. All in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy increases over time unless work is done to prevent it. And I don’t like doing work unless I have to!

So keep watching this space!

personal, thoughts

New Year, New Start?

1 January 2012 Keith

So am I making any New Year Resolutions? As those of you who follow at all closely will by now realised the answer is a resounding “No”. As I blogged on New Year’s Eve 2010 I do not do New Year Resolutions; I view them as a self-fulfilling failures. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t review the year just gone (the good, the bad, and the things I learnt) and look at the year ahead and what I want to achieve. I’ve done that over the last couple of days and I have an idea where I need to focus over the coming year. No, it isn’t for sharing here — it would be way too much information!

However over-riding all of this I have a few guiding principles by which I try to live. I share them with you as my “New Year Message” and because they may help you, my readers, understand where I’m coming from:

Zen Mischief

Nude when possible, clothed when necessary

If it harm none, do as you will

Sex and nudity are normal

Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself

Say what you mean and do what you say

Don’t worry about things you can’t change

Above all remember:

There are two approaches to life:
– to accept it, get on and enjoy it, or
– to fight it and become miserable & sad

Here’s wishing you a happy and successful 2012!

personal

Happy New Year

31 December 2011 Keith

Here’s wishing everyone a
Happy and Prosperous 2012!

memes, photography

Listography : Top 5 Photos of 2011

31 December 2011 Keith 7 Comments

I’m glad that Kate’s Listography this week has eschewed the temptation to ask about our New Year Resolutions — if only because I don’t believe NYRs!

No, this week Kate has asked us to choose our five favourite photos of 2011 from amongst those we’ve taken. This I like! I could easily do a lot more than five. So I decided that I’d give you my five favourite 2011 flower photographs from my Flickr photostream.

1. Crocuses (taken in our garden in February)

2. Jonquil (taken in our garden in March)

3. Peony (taken at Kew Gardens in May)

4. Hebe (taken in our garden in July)

5. Hollyhock (taken in Chipping Norton in September)

The Peony and the Crocuses appeared in my photobook (see on the right).

Enjoy!

Have a great 2012!

beliefs, books, food+drink, memes, music, personal, quotes

Ten Things of 2011: The Summary

30 December 2011 Keith

Back in January I set out to write ten things each month so that at the end of this year you knew 120 more things about me: things I like and things I dislike. Just for the record, and seeing as it's the end of the year, here is the complete list …

Things I Like

Sex
Cats
Steam Trains
Koi
Nudity
Roses
Beer
Sunshine
Photography
Tea
Beaujolais Nouveau
Fresh Snow

Things I Won't Do

Play Golf
Sailing
Ballroom Dancing
Bungee Jumping
Wearing DJ/Tuxedo
Wear Jacket and Tie on Holiday
Parachute
Eat Sheep's Eyes or Tripe
Take any more Exams
Halloween
Plumbing
Go Horse Racing

Something I want to do

Visit Japan
Take a Trip on Orient Express
Expand my Family History
Travel Wick/Thurso to Penzence by Train
Have Acupuncture
Have a Nudist Holiday
Visit Scilly Isles
Win £2M
Get Rid of my Depression
Fly on Flightdeck of an Airliner
Visit Norway & Sweden
Write a Book

Blogs I Like

Katyboo
Emily Nagoski :: Sex Nerd
The Magistrates Blog
Art by Ren Adams
Whoopee
Aetiology
Not Exactly Rocket Science
Norn's Notebook
The Loom
Bad Science
Cocktail Party Physics
Postsecret

Books I Like

Anthony Powell; A Dance to the Music of Time
Brad Warner; Sex, Sin & Zen
Mary Roach; Stiff
Lewis Carroll; Alice in Wonderland
Brown, Fergusson, Lawrence & Lees; Tracks & Signs
of the Birds of Britain & Europe
John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie
Diary of Samuel Pepys
AN Wilson, After the Victorians
Florence Greenberg; Jewish Cookery
Nick McCamley; Secret Underground Cities
Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
Charles Nicholls; The Reckoning

Music I Like

Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
Beatles, Abbey Road
Yes, Close to the Edge
Monteverdi, 1610 Vespers
Caravan, In the Land of Pink & Grey
Carl Orff, Carmina Burana
Amanda Palmer, Map of Tasmania
William Byrd, The Battell
Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly
Moody Blues, Octave
Handel, Messiah
JS Bach, Christmas Oratorio

Food I Like

Curry
Pasta
Sausage
Butter Beans
Whitebait
Avocado
Cheese
Smoked Fish, especially Eel
Chips
Swiss Chard
Pizza
Treacle Tart

Food & Drink I Dislike

Egg Custard
Carrots
Sweetcorn
Pernod
Sheep's Eyes
Green Tea
Tapioca
Absinthe
Marron Glacé
Milk
Sweet Potatoes
Butternut Squash

Words I Like

Cunt
Crenellate
Merkin
Merhari
Amniomancy
Vespiary
Numpty
Halberd
Verisimilitude
Persiflage
Mendicant
Antepenultimate

Quotes I Like

If you don't concern yourself with your wife's cat, you will lose something irretrievable between you. [Haruki Murakami]
When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. [Joseph Campbell]
The purpose of our lives is to be happy. [Dalai Lama]
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. [Flannery O’Connor]
I like small furry animals — as long as they're tasty. [Lisa Jardine]
The covers of this book are too far apart. [Ambrose Bierce]
It will pass, sir, like other days in the army. [Anthony Powell]
The gap between strategic rhetoric and operational reality remains dangerously wide. [Prof. Gordon Hewitt]
Pro bono publico, nil bloody panico. [Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles]
Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know? [Groucho Marx]
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. [JBS Haldane]
If we don't change our direction we're liable to end up where we're going. [Chinese Proverb]

quotes

Quotes of the Week

29 December 2011 Keith 2 Comments

This week’s mix …

Mother Parrot’s Advice to her Children
Never get up till the sun gets up,
Or the mists will give you a cold,
And a parrot whose lungs have once been touched
Will never live to be old.
Never eat plums that are not quite ripe,
For perhaps they will give you a pain:
And never dispute what the hornbill says,
Or you’ll never dispute again.
Never despise the power of speech:
Learn every word as it comes,
For this is the pride of the parrot race,
That it speaks in a thousand tongues.
Never stay up when the sun goes down,
But sleep in your own home bed,
And if you’ve been good, as a parrot should,
You will dream that your tail is red.
[Ganda, Africa; translated by AK Nyabongo; with thanks to Nick Birns]

In the little moment that
remains to us between
the crisis and the catastrophe
we may as well
drink a glass
of champagne.
[Paul Claudel; with thanks to Nick Birns]

Truth has nothing to do with the number of people it convinces.
[Paul Claudel]

Before using your potato baking dishes make sure that the potatoes you use are clean and ready to cook and that you follow the manufacturers guidelines for cooking potatoes for the cooking method you propose choosing.
[‘Ere God, you didn’t send the manual with my spuds!]

Tweeting by post made me appreciate the online and the offline. Brevity is a good thing, but there’s no reason we should only be brief on Twitter. The internet is a marvellous thing, but so is cheese, so are close friends who know your opinions and respect them, so is a glass of fine English ale. So is getting postcards from interesting people, because it makes your letterbox come alive.
[Giles Turnbull, quoted at The Next Web]

For malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
[AE Housman, A Shropshire Lad]

amusements