… if this is the logic!
BBC Breakfast is this morning reporting the need to “halve the number of people in the UK with HIV”. And how are we going to do this? But getting people tested earlier, etc. etc.
No, guys!
Even if there were zero new infections, the only way you halve the number of people with an incurable disease is for them to die!
So did you mean you need to halve the number of new cases? Or halve the number of people who have HIV but are undiagnosed? Or what did you mean?
Just in time for Christmas …
![[48/52] Autumn Oak](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6411557571_1dc92d30f6.jpg)
Week 48 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
Looking up into our 10-15 year old oak tree. It has shed about half its leaves and what remain are all manner of colours from green through gold to brown in the autumn sunshine and against a cloudless sky.
Crepuscular
OK so here’s week two of my experiment: this week’s things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful:
This week’s small selection of the curious and not-so-curious you may have missed …
According to a recent survey people spend too long in the shower and use too much water. And it isn’t as green as we were told. Now there’s a surprise!
But then no wonder we go for the therapeutic, because according to uSwitch the UK is the worst place in Europe to live. Well it is if you care about what they measure. For geeks like me you can follow their method, recalculate the scores, exclude things you don’t care about and add in other things you do care about. But you’ll still get much the same answer. 🙁
Now here’s a seriously WOW! image. Yes it’s a European Hornet, Vespa crabro; a humongous but relatively docile wasp**. Sadly you don’t see them often. But just look at those compound eyes … and the detail which I’m sure shows the substructure underneath the eye. I’ve looked out other images of hornets and they all seem to show the same eye substructure. Absolutely amazing!
If you had a pet monkey, would you feed it crap food and never let it exercise or play and tell it how stupid and ugly it was? No, you’d love your pet monkey! So love your Monkey!
We all make mistakes. They’re nothing to hide. But we all do hide mistake, because they make us feel stupid. Don’t be afraid of Stupid. Stupid means self-awareness. Stupid means you’re learning. Love your Stupid.
![[47/52] Another Era Warps into View ...](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7018/6405617805_32a5e63122.jpg)
Week 47 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
Another take on the vintage cars in London on 5 November in preparation for the London to Brighton run.
What a strange mix we have this week …
If your dog had your brain and could speak, and if you asked it what it thought of your sex life, you might be surprised by its response. It would be something like this:
Those disgusting humans have sex any day of the month! Barbara proposes sex even when she knows perfectly well that she isn’t fertile – like just after her period. John is eager for sex all the time, without caring whether his efforts could result in a baby or not. But if you want to hear something really gross – Barbara and John kept on having sex while she was pregnant! That’s as bad as all the times when John’s parents come for a visit, and I can hear them too having sex, although John’s mother went through this thing they call menopause years ago. Now she can’t have babies any more, but she still wants sex, and John’s father obliges her. What a waste of effort! Here’s the weirdest thing of all: Barbara and John, and John’s parents, close the bedroom door and have sex in private, instead of doing it in front of their friends like any self-respecting dog!
[Jared Diamond; Why is Sex Fun?]
The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself.
[George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”, Horizon, September 1941]
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters however … the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within.
[Sigmund Freud]
If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.
[George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk, 7 November 2011]
The answer may depend on the quantity of rare earth elements used.
A few days ago I spotted an article on the web under the headline Your Prius’ Deepest, Darkest Secret points out that many products which appear to to reduce ones environmental footprint actually contain relatively large quantities of rare earth elements, which have to be mined and refined — a dirty process at the best of times.
Neodymium magnets turn wind turbines. Cerium helps reduce tailpipe emissions. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as eight different rare earths … Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something that doesn’t contain at least one of the rare earths, from smartphones to laptop batteries to flat-screen TVs. They’re also crucial for defence technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, and the navigation systems in smart bombs.
No surprise therefore that the demand for rare earths is sky-rocketing and mining is expanding accordingly. Mining and refining produce mountains of waste from rock spoil to harsh acids as well as consuming gargantuan quantities of energy. And mining companies don’t have good track records at reducing and managing any of this.
Another side of the coin is that many of these elements are used in such small quantities that recovering them from old products and recycling them becomes equally as hard as the original refining.
As I pointed out here and as the article concludes: What good is green technology if it’s based on minerals whose extraction is so, well, ungreen?
Gawdelpus.
This is from Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond:
A hint that the large human penis serves as some sort of signal may be gained by watching what happens when men take the opportunity to design their own penises, rather than remaining content with their evolutionary legacy. Men in the highlands of New Guinea do that by enclosing the penis in a decorative sheath called a phallocarp. The sheath is up to two feet long and four inches in diameter, often bright red or yellow in color, and variously decorated at the tip with fur, leaves, or a forked ornament. When I first encountered New Guinea men with phallocarps, among the Ketengban tribe in the Star Mountains […] I had already heard a lot about them and was curious to see how they were used and how people explained them. It turned out that men wore their phallocarps constantly […] Each man owns several models, varying in size, ornamentation, and angle of erection, and each day he selects a model to wear according to his mood, much as each morning we select a shirt to wear. In response to my question as to why they wore phallocarps, the Ketengbans replied that they felt naked and immodest without them [despite that they] were otherwise completely naked and left even their testes exposed. In effect, the phallocarp is a conspicuous erect pseudo-penis representing what a man would like to be endowed with. The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina. A phallocarp shows us what the human penis would look like if it were not subject to that practical constraint.