At the third (sorry, fourth) stroke, it will be...

I've been trying to get my head around this leap-second business. If I've got it right, it's to bring the atomic clocks back into line with what the earth is doing. Apparently, on a very small scale, the earth is getting ever more slow in its orbit around the sun, which means that the atomic clocks are racing ahead and have to be corrected every now and again. So far, so good, but what I can't understand is that there is apparently a strong suggestion that we should ditch GMT altogether and switch to atomic time. But this would be the tail wagging the dog surely? To the extent that "real" time exists, it is measured by events in the natural world - sunrise and sunset and the passage of the seasons. If there is any discrepancy between those things and what a clock or a calendar says, then it is the clock or calendar which must give way, surely?

The perfect failure.

As one who has suffered through the years with the failings of their local football team (although the Wolves are doing OK this season, though Lord knows how) I can feel for the supporters of the American football team the Detroit Lions, who have just finished their season with the stats of Played 16, Lost 16. Detroit of course is also known as Motown, and some wag in the newspapers has suggested that it should now be known as Woetown.

Yes, but look at him!

Two scenarios - (1) I earn £30,000 a year, you earn £10,000 a year. (2) I earn £50,000 a year, you earn £20,000. Which scenario would you prefer? It may seem a silly question, but it all depends on how you look at it. You earn twice as much in scenario 2, but the disparity between our earnings is £10,000 greater. And when people talk about "the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer" it is often the disparity between rich and poor they are talking about, rather than the actual levels of wealth. It's a bit reminiscent of pay negotiations back in the 50s and 60s, when how much you were being offered seemed to be less important than how much others were earning and "maintaining the differentials". If we could concentrate more on our own situation and stop looking at what others are doing we might be more content.

Music Man / Ha ha.

Those who play musical instruments are prone to take the mickey out of those who play different instruments from their own. You've probably heard this one -

What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A drummer!

But the one group which comes in for more stick than any other are viola players. There are enough jokes about violists to stretch from here to goodness knows where. Here's a few one-liners -

What's the similarity between The Beatles and the viola section of an orchestra?
Neither has played together since 1970.

How do you keep a violist from drowning?
Take your foot off their head.

How is lightning like a violist's finger?
Neither strikes in the same place twice.

How do you keep your violin from being stolen?
Put it in a viola case.

And then there's the story of a violinist in an orchestra who was intrigued by one of the viola players who, whenever he sat down to play, always opened his jacket and looked at something which appeared to be attached to his inside pocket. One hot summer, when the orchestra was rehearsing, the violist took his jacket off and hung it on the back of his chair. When they broke for drinks and the violist had left the stage, the violinist took his chance and walked over to his seat and looked inside his jacket. And there he saw a note pinned to the lining - "Viola left hand, bow right hand".

Is it the singer or the song?

Some of you have been kind enough to say nice things about this blog, and for that I thank you. But you know little or nothing about me as a person, so your comments refer solely to what I say, not who or what I am. And that is how it should be, but so often is not. Look at all the fuss about Channel 4's alternative Christmas message, simply because it was delivered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, who apparently we are not supposed to like. But ignore who he is, and look at what he said (which you can find on Channel 4's website, among other places). What is there to take exception to? It is a gracious message fully in keeping with the Christmas festival. Wise words do not become any less wise simply because we dislike the mouth they come from.

Good King Wenceslas looked out...

...on the feast of Stephen. And that's today folks. We may call this day Boxing Day, but long before it took that name it was and still is St. Stephen's Day. Stephen's claim to fame is that he is acknowledged by the Church as the first Christian martyr, being stoned to death in around 34-35 A.D. for the blasphemy of suggesting that Jesus's teaching would eventually supplant the law of Moses. Wenceslas, by the way, was a real person - he was ruler of Bohemia from 921-935, though a Duke rather than a King.

Naughty, naughty.

So like a good boy or girl, you are going to drive to church this morning, and then come home and have a turkey dinner followed by a mince pie. Well, prepare to go to gaol! An Act of 1551 makes it illegal to go to church on Christmas Day other than on foot, an ordinance of 1588 makes it an offence to eat anything other than a goose today and in 1657 or thereabouts, Oliver Cromwell passed a law banning the eating of mince pies - and none of these laws have ever been repealed!

Nonetheless, a happy Christmas to one and all.

Christmas Eve

You might wonder why the day before some special day is often given its own name - New Year's Eve, Hallowe'en and of course, Christmas Eve. Well the answer is that back in the mists of time, the day was deemed to start at sundown rather than, as at present, midnight. So all these Eves were in fact the beginning of the following day. In many parts of Europe, Christmas Eve is celebrated even more than the day itself - it is often the day presents are exchanged and the main festive meal eaten. And why do we hang up stockings - well one theory is that this is done to catch anything which Santa might drop while climbing down the chimney!

Who pays?

I see the BBC has been fined again for misleading viewers (or in this case I think it was actually listeners) - but hang on a minute, where does the BBC get its money from? You and me, the licence payers! So we who were sinned against are footing the bill for those who sinned against us - makes no sense to me!

Music Man

With all this fuss about the song "Hallelujah" I thought I ought to do a bit of research. There seem to be plenty of versions of it, and having listened to them I have to say that the X-Factor girl Alexandra Burke's is not bad, and better than some, even if it is a bit emotionally over the top and heavily dependent on the arrangement and the backing. But I am far more attracted to the various parodies, and for me the pick of the bunch is the one you will find at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kIMBxwKzlKs. Not only are the lyrics clever and - unlike the original - make sense, but whoever sings it has a good voice and musically, it stands up with the best of them.

Things are never straightforward.

Today is the shortest day. So as from tomorrow the time of sunrise will get earlier, and the time of sunset later, yes? Well no, actually. It's something to do with the earth being on a slant vis-a-vis the sun or something like that, but in fact the afternoons have already been pulling out - albeit only marginally - for about a week, and it will be New Year before the mornings start getting lighter. Another of those interesting(?) facts.

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, CH (1890 – 1971)

As an addendum to yesterday's post, many of A. P. Herbert's Punch stories have been collected and published in a book under the title "Uncommon Law", and there may be those of you who remember some of them being dramatised on the BBC in the late 1960s in a series called "Misleading Cases". Although written to be funny, his stories were always founded on proper law. One of my favourites involved a collision between a car and a rowing-boat on a flooded road - the point being that the anti-collision rules of the road and the sea are the opposite of each other. On the road you keep to the left, at sea you keep to the right. So the issue was - is a flooded road still a road, or does it become subject to maritime law? The car was keeping left, while the rowing-boat was obeying the "port to port" rule, and bang! Perhaps the most amazing aspect of these stories is that apparently when they were published in other countries many of them were taken seriously and as a true representation of English law!

Bills of exchange.

I don't know whether the man who sought to pay a parking fine by writing a cheque on toilet paper ("stationery which aptly reflects my feelings towards the system...") is a fan of A. P. Herbert but it immediately brought to mind one of the many of his stories originally published in Punch magazine in the 1920s and 30s. APH was both a lawyer and a humourist who wrote funny stories about fictitious court cases. One of these was entitled "The Negotiable Cow" which involved a man who tried to pay his income tax bill by means of a cheque written on the side of a cow. The Revenue refused to accept it, and took him to court. This being an APH story of course, the Revenue lost. The judgment of the court was that "...an order to pay is an order to pay, whether it is made on the back of an envelope or on the back of a cow..." and as it was accepted that the account involved had the funds to meet it, it constituted a valid cheque. Indeed there was no argument that the man's toilet paper cheque was not equally valid, but as it was not in the standard printed form, the bank would have charged an extra £15 to process it which is why the police authority concerned refused to accept it. A cheque, of course, is not legal tender, and therefore you are never under any obligation to accept one in payment of a debt.

A bridge too...

The Millennium Bridge was built as a pedestrian bridge, and yet it was people walking across it which caused it to wobble and in a very short time to be closed. A classic example of the law of unforeseen consequences - or perhaps of consequences which should have been foreseen, but weren't?

Marks out of 10?

Considerable embarrassment has been caused to Scotland Yard by the revelation that one of their anti-terrorist advisers is himself wanted by Interpol for alleged past terrorist activities. Whether or not under these circumstances he should ever have been appointed in the first place is one question, but his suitability to remain in his post now that this is known is, I would suggest, more a matter of how well he is and has been doing the job. After all, don't forget the old adage "Set a thief to catch a thief".

The connection that isn't?

Ken Livingstone and Sir Ian Blair have both gone on record to say that in their opinion "nobody was to blame" for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Maybe so, maybe not, but when will we learn to accept that "responsibility" and "blame" are not the same thing? Clearly somebody (maybe more than one person) must have been responsible, in that their action - or inaction - led directly to the outcome, and perhaps if we could break this link between responsibility and blame, they might be prepared to come out into the open and 'fess up.

And the winner is...

I wouldn't normally go within a hundred miles of "X Factor", but as the BBC insist that it is news, I was regaled on their bulletin with a snatch of the winner's performance of a song called, apparently, "Hallelu(breath)jah". As far as I could see and hear it was another case of emotion and passion being mistaken for talent. She's not rubbish by any means, but to my ear she has a pretty ordinary voice depending strongly on electronic assistance, and her delivery is nothing special. But then, what do I know? I'm sure she'll go on to make a packet, and good luck to her.

Wrong question?

So what have we learned from the de Menezes inquest? Not a great deal I fear, because the emphasis seems to have been on the wrong things. The actions of the police who actually shot Mr de Menezes have come under great scrutiny - did they shout a warning, did he move towards them etc. - but to my mind this is pretty immaterial, because whether they or he did or didn't wouldn't really have affected the outcome. The fundamental element as I see it is that at some point the intelligence (if one can call it such) changed from "We think it might be him, but we're not sure" to "It is him" and from that point on, Mr de Menezes' fate was more or less sealed. So the question is, when did that happen, how and why did it happen, and who was - or more likely were - responsible for it happening.

How many? (4)

So, to recap -

A permutation is a grouping in which order matters (i.e. ABCDE is different from BACDE etc.).

The number of possible permutations of N things is N!
The number of possible permutations of N things selected from T things is T!/(T-N)!, or putting it more simply, the first N terms of T!

A combination is a grouping where order does not matter (i.e. ABCDE, BACDE and any other arrangement of the first five letters of the alphabet are considered the same group)

The number of combinations of N things selected from T things is T!/N!(T-N)!, or putting it more simply, the first N terms of T! divided by N! (or the first T-N terms of T! divided by (T-N)! - whichever is easier).

Just as a sideline, I hope those of you who have done the football pools and written "perm any 8 from 10" or some such, will now realise that this is not a permutation at all, but a combination - all that matters is which 8 games are chosen. Order is immaterial.

Hola - buenos dias!

Many, many years ago my wife and I talked seriously about the possibility of moving to Spain - well, Majorca actually. The main attraction - apart from the climate - was the cost of living. We reckoned our money would go at least twice as far there as it would here. For various reasons, we never got any further than talking about it, but how things have changed! Now people who did take the plunge back then are finding it difficult to manage, particularly with a weak pound buying less and less euros, and many of them are having to sell up and come back. I suppose it was naive to think that the economic disparity between the two countries would remain the same, but for a time, it was a nice dream.

Connection - what connection?

A very interesting report published the other day revealed that older drivers get proportionately far more speeding tickets than young drivers. Why interesting? Well, as any insurance company will tell you, in terms of their involvement in accidents, older drivers are far far safer than young drivers. So it would seem that the much-vaunted supposed relationship between exceeding the speed limit and driving dangerously on which so much of our road traffic law is based simply doesn't exist. It would be nice to think that someone in authority will take some notice of this, but I'm not holding my breath.

My choice.

Why do we continue to bang on about assisted suicide when what we are talking about is assisted dying? Surely somebody who is coming to the end of their life is entitled - if they wish - to have some say as to the how, where and when of it? I would hope that if and when I reach that stage I will still be competent enough to make my own arrangements, but if not, blessings be upon anyone who gives me a helping hand.

What arrogance!

There are those who object to the expansion of airports, for various reasons. That's their privilege. But there's no excuse for the prats who invaded Stansted Airport and brought flights there to a halt for several hours, causing disruption and misery to who knows how many. This is another example of the "My views are so important that they over-ride your right to live your life" approach which so many pressure groups now seem to adopt as a matter of course. Apparently the name of the group involved was Plane Stupid - well, stupid is as stupid does, and what you did was stupid!

Legal question.

Ignoring the distressing and emotional aspects of the Shannon Matthews case, I would really be interested to know whether her mother was in fact charged with kidnapping her (rather than conspiracy to, or aiding and abetting kidnap). Because it seems to me at least arguable that a custodial or jointly custodial parent cannot in law kidnap their own child. As a parent you have the right to ground your child and forbid them to leave the house, or send them to their room and keep them there, and indeed generally restrict or even proscribe their movements, and as kidnapping effectively involves the exercise of these powers then I cannot see how the offence can be charged against a parent. Can anybody help?

Cart before horse?

Why, my paper asks, was Damien Green MP arrested rather than just questioned by the police? How naïve! The answer is of course that by arresting a person the police thereby get the authority to search their house and other premises - hoping of course that by so doing they will uncover evidence to justify the arrest. Shamelessly cynical, but that's the way the police work these days, and until someone is brave enough - and rich enough - to take them to court and challenge the basis of the "reasonable belief" on which they founded their decision to arrest, they will continue to do so.

Music Man

How do you like your Messiah? When I was a lad, you got together the biggest choir you could and took the whole thing in a very stately, considered way. More recently it has become the fashion to use a much smaller choral ensemble and significantly up the tempi. It says much for the genius of Handel (who apparently knocked out the whole thing in just over three weeks) that it doesn't matter how you approach it, the work speaks for itself. Me, for listening to I think I favour the more modern spare zippy approach, but for singing, there's nothing to beat the thrill of being in a really big choir and giving it some serious wellie!

How many? (3)

Let us suppose that the England football manager (or coach, as we now apparently have to call him) has chosen a squad of 15 players for a certain game, and now must pick his team from this squad. Assuming any player can play in any position, how many different teams can he come up with? This is somewhat different from what we have discussed before, because here order doesn't matter. All that matters is which 11 players are chosen - the order in which they are chosen is of no consequence. So how do we calculate this? Well, if order did matter, we know from last time that the answer would be the first 11 terms of factorial 15, that is 15x14x13x12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5 = 54,486,432,000. But let's just look at one possible team - players A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J and K. These 11 players as we know could be arranged in 11! different ways, but for the purpose of choosing a team, this is just a single grouping. The same goes for any other 11 players, so what we have to do is divide 54,486,432.000 by 11! (39,916,800) and this comes to 1,365. A non-ordered grouping is called a combination, and the formula is that the number of combinations of N things selected from T things is T!/N!(T-N)!. Here T is 15, N is 11, so T-N is 4, and that gives us 15x14x13x12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1/11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1x4x3x2x1 and cancelling out top and bottom leaves us with 15x14x13x12/4x3x2x1 which comes to 1,365.
We'll draw all this together next time.

Identity crisis.

Beware the Immigration and Citizenship Bill which the government intend to introduce in this Parliament. Ostensibly, it is designed, among other things, to allow the police and immigration authorities to keep a closer check on those who have come into the country from elsewhere by being given the power to require them to prove their identity on demand. But a close examination of the wording of the Bill reveals that this power is to apply to anyone who "has entered the UK", and clearly this could extend to anyone who has gone abroad - for work or on holiday - and then come back. It is to be hoped that the Bill will be amended to make it clear that it does not apply to UK citizens, but to simply assume that this power would never be used in this way would be disingenuous, given the way in which the prevention of terrorism legislation has been, and continues to be used for purposes well outside its originally intended ambit.

So it was just one of those things?

The coroner in the de Menezes inquest has ruled that the jury cannot return a verdict of "unlawful killing". This means that he is satisfied as a matter of law, that there is insufficient evidence that any crime has been committed by any individual. Whilst it is pretty clear that the shooting was the result of a tragic cock-up, not to allow the jury to consider whether that cock-up was serious enough to possibly amount to corporate manslaughter by gross negligence would seem perverse. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the decision has been taken on high that the whole thing should be treated as an unfortunate accident and the case closed. It is shameful that nobody apparently has got the guts to hold their hands up and accept at least some responsibility for the unwarranted death of this unfortunate man.

How things have changed.

My post the other day about my childhood memories of Woolworth reminded me that back then there were two High Street "cheap as chips" stores. Woolworth were considered the slightly more upmarket of the two. And the other even cheaper one? Marks & Spencer!

Coincidence?

Has anybody else noticed that the £150,000 a year threshold at which the new 45p in the £ tax rate will kick in is just comfortably above the salary of a Cabinet Minister?