See you in court...

So what are we to make of this court case over Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code"? The authors of "The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail" (or to be more accurate, two out of the three authors) have issued a writ claiming Brown has pinched his basic idea from their book. I foresee they will have great difficulty in persuading the court that he has done anything more than use their research - which he openly accepts by specifically referring to their book in his story. I would have more sympathy for them if they had not waited the best part of three years before making their move. Is it just coincidence that the film is due out in the next few months? I am reminded of that saying "where there's a hit, there's a writ".

Rugby Union

The current Six Nations Championship may be the most open - and therefore from that point of view, the most interesting and exciting - for several seasons, but the standard of rugby being played is pretty dire. I think the people who must really be rubbing their hands are Australia and New Zealand, who must now be really fancying their chances in next year's World Cup. If we can't produce anything better than what's been on offer so far - and by "we" I mean the Northern Hemisphere teams - we are going to be buried!

I say, I say....

A quotation I came across recently from physicist Steven Weinberg which seems particularly apposite at present -
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

...nor any drop to drink.

One of our recent holidays was to Madeira where, centuries ago, they recognised the need to move water from the areas of the island with high rainfall to the more arid areas, and to this end constructed a network of "levadas" or aqueducts to do the job. We have much the same problem in these islands - plenty of rain up north, but much less as you move down south, and particularly in the south-east, and what there is tends to run straight off into the sea. Unfortunately, we've never had the foresight to do anything about it, so once again the papers are full of dire warnings about water shortages, hosepipe bans and so on. It's a solvable problem, but have we got the political will to solve it?

A pin in a haystack

Do you have trouble remembering your PIN numbers? Do you wish you could just write them down and be done with? Well, you can - provided you encrypt them first. Encryption sounds terribly complicated and hi-tech, but it doesn't have to be. Here's a simple example - take each of the digits of your PIN number in turn, take it away from 10, and write down the answer (0 stays as 0). So if your PIN number is 8014 for example, you would write down 2096. You can now carry this number around with you quite openly - without knowing (or guessing) the method you have used, there's no way anybody can get from that number to your PIN number. You on the other hand simply have to reverse the process, deducting each digit in turn from 10, to get back to your PIN number. Another method I saw in a novel I was reading the other day was writing the PIN number down backwards, deducting 1 from each digit - so 8014 would become 3097. I wouldn't suggest you use either of these methods now they have been published, but perhaps they will give you some ideas of your own. Of course, you still need to take the usual precautions when using a PIN number, otherwise if somebody finds out what it is, they could work backwards and discover your method, and then all your other PINs would be compromised.

Lock 'em up (continued)...

Why do we lock people up? Deterrence? Doesn't work - just look at the reoffending rates. Rehabilitation? Doesn't work - same comment. Retribution? Possibly, but as discussed yesterday, it's an expensive way of going about it, and it can be argued there are better means of achieving that objective. Security? Ah, yes, now we're getting there! Imprisonment should be confined to those who present a positive danger to society, or some member(s) thereof. But in fact our prisons are full of people who pose no danger whatever to anyone, and to keep them there is uncivilised and costs a great deal of money. Of course, there is another side to the coin - those who do present a danger should not only be imprisoned, but kept in prison on an indefinite basis until such time as they no longer pose a threat - if indeed such a time ever comes. I would suggest that such an approach would probably reduce the prison population by some 60% or more as well as saving a great deal of public money, and relieving a great deal of personal misery.

Lock 'em up!

Is prison a cost-effective way of dealing with criminals? Is it a civilised way of dealing with criminals? First question first - official figures put the cost of keeping a person in prison at approaching £30,000 a year. Clearly this is an average figure - it will be significantly more for Category A prisoners, and significantly less for those in open prisons, but even at the lower end, it's about £12,500. That's a lot of money, and it doesn't include any knock-on costs, such as prisoners' families having to apply for social security as a result of losing their bread-winner. As many people are in prison for economic offences - ranging from simple non-payment of fines, through casual shoplifting to white-collar fraud, we can make a simple calculation. What, for example, is the point of sending a person to prison for 6 weeks, at a cost of something like £750 (allowing for remission) for failure to pay a £250 fine? Would it not be more sensible to require the person concerned to do, say, £500 worth of unpaid work (the extra to cover the cost of supervision)? But what about those whose crime is not economic? That raises the second question, which I'll deal with tomorrow.

Fair do's.

One of the news stories while I was away concerned the reinstatement of Professor Meadow who was struck off by the GMC following a woman being wrongly convicted of killing her children based mainly on his expert evidence. Although Professor Meadow clearly carries a great deal of responsibility for what happened, he was, I feel, made a scapegoat for failings in the court procedures which were nothing to do with him. The evidence which clearly made a great impression on the jury, and which may well have clinched their guilty verdict was his statement that the odds on two cot deaths occurring in the same family were 73 million to 1. Quite apart from any other considerations, this was a basic statistical error, somewhat similar to what is known as the "gambler's fallacy". But the point is that Professor Meadow was not, and as far as I am aware never put himself forward as an expert in statistics - his field of expertise was paediatrics, and it was on this basis that he was called as a witness. So why (a) was he allowed to give evidence as an expert witness on a matter outside his field, (b) why was this not challenged by the defence, and (c) why did the Judge not instruct the jury that this statement should not be treated as the opinion of an expert? Professor Meadow was asked a question, and gave an honest, if mistaken answer. To hold him solely responsible for the consequences was unfair.

Oh, to be in.........England?

Spent the last week in Tenerife getting some sun on the old bones - not that there was that much sun actually, but it was nice and warm, and that's the main thing. I'm always struck by the complete difference in attitude you find more or less wherever you go abroad - certainly in the Med and the Canaries. We're so used here to being regulated every step of the way that it's a breath of fresh air to go somewhere where everybody seems to do their own thing in their own way, and is equally prepared to let others do the same. Our apartment overlooked a main street, and people just double-parked outside whichever shop they wanted to visit, or if they saw someone they knew on the pavement, they would simply stop in the road and have a chat. But more to the point, the other road users seemed quite happy to go along with this, whereas here such behaviour would result in curses and horn-blowing, not to mention a probable fixed-penalty fine from an officious policeman or meter warden. Perhaps it's the climate that makes everyone more laid-back, but whatever it is, I wish we could import it over here.

Vote for me!

The Electoral Commission have once again raised concerns about postal voting. When this subject is discussed, the problems raised usually concern identity fraud, but to me this is not the main worry. I'm sure the business of people registering and voting under multiple names or in the names of fictitious or dead people and so on can be overcome - at a cost. No, what bothers me is that, however good the system, you can never know whether, when a postal voter was casting their vote, someone was not looking over their shoulder telling them where to put their cross. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence - certainly here in the Midlands - of people being put under pressure by family or employers to apply for a postal vote, and then to demonstrate to them that they had voted in a certain way. The essence of our system is the secret ballot, and I fear that this is incompatible with any method of postal voting.

A word to the wise.

If you should chance to be carrying a table-leg around, please don't put it in a plastic bag. If you live in a block of flats, try and ensure that it's not one where other tenants are being watched as suspected terrorists. If you're driving round in your car with your girlfriend, I beg you not to use the same make of car as that of a known IRA gunman. Doing any of these things could seriously damage your health!

Compare and contrast...

I commented a couple of days ago on the wisdom, or otherwise, of putting the BNP leader on trial for making what were essentially private comments of an unpleasant nature. Now we have a Muslim cleric who has been publicly and openly making equally unpleasant comments for several years before any action was taken against him. Difficult to see the logic - or am I looking for something which doesn't exist?

Unbelievable!

A 73-year-old man who suffers from arthritis finds that smoking cannabis relieves his pain and discomfort. Not surprisingly, he is unwilling to have to approach drug-dealers for his supplies, so he decides to grow his own. There is no suggestion that what he is producing is for anything other than his own use. So what happens? You've guessed it - he's arrested and charged with producing a Class C drug, and may well end up in prison. "...the law" as Mr Bumble famously observed "is a ass—a idiot..."

Football - theirs and ours

Anybody stay up Sunday night and watch the SuperBowl? I need my beauty sleep these days, but it used to be an annual ritual - a pot of hot chilli beef simmering on the stove, and a stock of beers chilling in the fridge. The continuous advertising breaks got on my nerves, but I used to enjoy the game itself - a bit like living chess. Where I think we could learn a thing or two from American Football is the way they have structured the game to try and make sure that no one team dominates for more than a season or two. So very different from the Premiership, where before a ball is kicked you know that there are only at best four or five teams in with a realistic chance of winning - and it tends to be the same four or five teams season after season.

Rubbish!

There was a time - not that long ago - when the bin men knew where you kept your bin, would come and find it, take it out and empty it onto the cart, and then bring it back to where they took it from. These days, I have to take my own bin out, make sure the lid is right down, otherwise they won't touch it, and then, after it's been emptied, I have to collect it from wherever they have left it - could be anything up to about twenty yards away - and bring it back. I have a different bin for garden waste which I have to remember to put out on a different day and which they treat in much the same cavalier fashion, and now I'm being put under pressure to sort out newspapers, bottles and tins and put these in yet another container to be collected on yet another day. And meanwhile my Council Tax - including the environmental element - keeps going up by great lumps. So not only am I doing their job for them, I'm paying for the privilege!

What price Art?

As an addendum to yesterday's post, it seems the anger of many Muslims was not as a result of the irreverent cartoon portrayals of the Prophet, but at the fact that there were any portrayals at all. Strict Islamic law apparently forbids any depiction of any living thing. A bit extreme, you might think, until that is you discover (probably like me, with considerable surprise) that Christians should be subject to the same stricture. Good Christians would agree that they should live their lives according to the Commandments, and the second of them states -
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth...
Interesting, eh....?

R & R.

It is with some trepidation that a poke my stick into the wasps' nest which is freedom of speech and religious intolerance, but I hope I may be be allowed a few observations. Firstly the comments which landed the BNP leader in court, however obnoxious they might have been, were made at closed meetings, and were not meant for public consumption. So they equate more to me mouthing off to friends in the privacy of my own home on some pet hobby horse of mine, and I'm not sure to what extent the public interest was served by putting him on trial and giving his views such wide publicity . Secondly, it's worth remembering that Islam is some 600 years younger than Christianity, so any comparison of the way the two religions deal with criticism and ridicule should really be a comparison with Christianity as it was in the Middle Ages - the Inquisition, heresy trials, witches burnt at the stake and all that - so it's not that different really, is it? Thirdly, we talk of the "right" of free speech. Without getting too technical about the distinction between legal and residual rights, it's worth making the general point that rights bring with them responsibilities. You may have the right to publish cartoons which you know are going to be deeply offensive to someone else's religion, but is it a responsible thing to do?

Upsy-daisy

Milk in pints or litres? Potatoes in pounds or kilos? Distances in miles or kilometers? It's a generation thing - I find it difficult to visualise a centimeter, say, whereas I have no difficulty in visualising an inch. For my children and grandchildren it's the other way round - indeed my grandchildren would probably say "what's an inch?". As my generation die out, metrication will take over - it's inevitable. The one thing that does get my goat is temperature. I still find it rather easier to think in Fahrenheit terms, but have learned to cope with Centigrade. What annoys me is the relatively recent insistence on calling it Celsius. There's no question Fahrenheit invented the scale which now bears his name, but Celsius did not. It's true he invented a scale based on there being 100 degrees between freezing point and boiling point, but his scale was the other way round - boiling point was 0 degrees and freezing point 100. So to me the common scale now in use is and always will be Centigrade. If you want Celsius, you can have it - just deduct the Centigrade figure from 100, but don't expect it to make any sense.

Betcha!

Today's interesting fact - the prize on the Euro Lottery has now reached a figure where it exceeds the cost of buying tickets to cover every possible combination of numbers. You'd have to shell out something like £117m to do so, but with a jackpot of £125m that would give you a tax-free profit of around £8m - provided of course that you were the only winner. Anybody fancy a flutter?

Oh God - another letter from the tax people!

The deadline has now passed for returning your self-assessment tax forms and paying your dues. This year, the Inland Revenue have bombarded me with calculations, statements and several changes of tax code, and I've got completely bamboozled, and ended up paying them some forty quid which I'm not at all sure I owe them, but frankly I got fed up with trying to make sense of it all. The point is, if I - a reasonably intelligent ex-Civil Servant, used to form filling and bureaucracy - can't make head nor tail of it all, what chance has the ordinary man in the street got?