Can't escape.

Oh dear, Strictly Come Dancing is back on and, horror of horrors, one of the BBC Breakfast's presenters is a competitor, which of course means that, like it or not, we shall be treated to news of her progress on a regular basis.  I avoid the programme like the plague but do watch Breakfast in the mornings so I'm stuffed, aren't I?

Uhh???

Interesting question on Reddit (anyone else a fan?) - "if you missed the first 10 minutes, what would be the most confusing movie?"  And that resonated with me, because, before we were married, my wife and I used to go to the pictures after work on a Wednesday.  This was back when cinemas did rolling programmes, so we invariably got there 15 to 20 minutes into the main film, but rarely had any problem in picking up the story.  Then we'd watch the whole programme round again.  But this one time we just couldn't understand what the hell was going on and it wasn't until the second time round when we saw the beginning that it made any sense.  And the film?  The Manchurian Candidate - the original with Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey.  So that would be my answer.

Old 'uns the best?

A survey run by Radio Times to find viewers' favourite programmes of the last 60 years has - perhaps not surprisingly - come up with the usual suspects, like Morecambe and Wise, Blue Peter and Only Fools and Horses.  Is this simply nostalgia, or is it just that they don't make 'em like they used to - or are they both in fact the same thing?

Ha ha.

Liked this one I found on the net -
A woman walking down the street comes across a young girl sitting on the kerb, sobbing her heart out.  She sits down next to her and asks what's the matter.
"My dog died" sobs the girl.
Thinking to comfort her, the woman says "Well, look at it this way - your dog is with Jesus now".
The girl looks at her confused and says "What on earth would Jesus want with a dead dog?"

Ed the red.

So what did you make of Ed Milliband's speech to the Labour Party Conference the other day?  It was a good speech - well written and well delivered, but it was just a speech - just words - so what did it tell us?  Well what came across loud and clear to me is that a Milliband government - if there ever is to be such an animal - will be founded solidly on state control.  Back to the principles of nationalisation and five year plans.  Problem is, that approach has not got a good track record.  Mind you, the market forces approach hasn't been that brilliant either.  There must be a happy medium, mustn't there?  If only somebody can find it!

Well, I never!

Did you know that under section 32 of the Salmon Act 1986, it is illegal to "handle salmon in suspicious circumstances"?  The mind boggles!

Paradox?

No, this isn't really a paradox, it's just an unexpected, counter-intuitive  result. So... you travel from A to B (doesn't matter how far it is) at 40 mph and then travel back from B to A at 60 mph.  What is your average speed - 50 mph, yes?  Well, do the maths.  Speed is distance divided by time, so time is distance divided by speed, right?  So time to get there is d (whatever it is) /40 and time to come back is d/60. So total time for the trip (2d) is d/40 + d/60, which is 10d/240 or 5d/120.  Going back to our original statement that speed is distance divided by time, then the speed for the round trip is 2d divided by 5d/120.  We can ignore the "d"s which cancel each other out so the calculation becomes 2 divided by 5/120, which as I'm sure you remember from school is the same as 2 multiplied by 120/5, which is 240/5 which comes out as 48.  So your average speed is in fact 48mph.  No what you expected was it?

Hic!

In a recent post, I mentioned ABV (alcohol by volume) which is the way in which the alcoholic content of drink is expressed in the UK these days.  But it wasn't always so - indeed the legal requirement to use that measurement only goes back to 1980. Prior to that, several means were used, the oldest of which is "degrees proof".  This goes back three hundred or so years, to the days when British sailors were provided with a daily tot of rum as part of their rations.  To ensure that the rum was of the required strength, it would be mixed with gunpowder and set alight. If it didn't burn, it was rejected.  If it did. this was "proof" that it was good to drink. As time went by, the procedure became more structured, and the rule became that degrees proof was obtained by multiplying the alcoholic content by volume by 7/4. So a hundred degrees proof is the equivalent of just over 57% ABV.  The Americans still tend to use degrees proof on their bottles, although they use a similar but slightly different calculation.

Mountains out of molehills?

I am increasingly concerned at the way the media are seeking to make the news rather than simply report it.  I am no supporter of UKIP as previous posts will attest and Godfrey Bloom does seem to be a bit of a political and social dinosaur, but I have to feel sympathy with him over this "sluts" business.  If you examine a transcript of what was said it is clear that the word was used as part of a throw-away remark which was intended to be humorous and, more to the point, was unquestioningly accepted as such by those present.  But the media have got hold of it, blown it out of proportion, lined up people who weren't even there to make hostile negative comments about it, and Nigel Farage who, whatever you think of him is usually sure-footed when it comes to assessing the public mood, has more or less been forced into throwing him to the wolves.  So - media 1, objective facts 0 methinks.

Biff, bash, bosh!

The theory is, apparently, that because flies have such large (proportionately) and complex eyes, they see the world - and in particular any attempt by us to swat them - in slow motion and are thus able to avoid the newspaper, or whatever it is we are trying to duff them with.  You don't seem to get so many flies as you used to, but when I was a kid, they were a continual nuisance and during the summer months most rooms had an old-fashioned fly-paper hanging from the light fitting. The way I was taught was (1) never try to swat a stationary fly - wait until it moves, and then (2) always aim just behind it - the idea being that in an emergency, a fly will take off backwards. Where that came from I don't know, but it did seem to work reasonably well.  Or perhaps I was just faster back then - these days I tend to open the nearest door or window and try to usher the little bugger out with whatever comes to hand.

Ugh!

I got about two-thirds of the way through the first episode of "Peaky Blinders" before I gave up.  And I so wanted to like it.  It's my neck of the woods after all, and my Grandma (no, not that one, the other one) used to tell me stories about the "blinders" she remembered from her youth.  But I found it so utterly depressing - just who was I supposed to relate to?  They were all such nasty pieces of work, I couldn't feel any sort of sympathy or empathy with any of them and I just lost interest.  Shall I try again?  Not sure.

Oh, boy (2)

Yes, we did go wrong, although it's not that easy to see it.  Let's recap - we said that with two children there are four possibilities - BB, BG, GB and GG, and if we know that at least one child is a boy, we can eliminate GG.  So far, so good.  But then we treat the remaining three cases as equally likely - and this is where we go wrong.  If we're going to treat BG and GB as two separate events (boy followed by girl, or girl followed by boy) then we must treat BB as two separate events.  It's easier to see if you give them names - let's say Jim and Fred - so we can have Jim followed by Fred, or Fred followed by Jim.  So we have four possibilities, not three - JF, FJ, BG and GB, of which two satisfy the statement "both are boys" and the probability is therefore 2 in 4, or 1 in 2.  So it's a 50% probability in both cases.

Dead is dead.

I don't know about anybody else, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to understand why killing somebody by gassing them is a war crime, but killing them by shooting them or blowing them up is OK.

Love it or hate it.

I love it - Marmite, that is.  But I'd never really thought about where the name comes from.  It's a French word (and therefore presumably should be pronounced mar-meet) and simply means an earthenware cooking pot - there's a picture of one on the label.  Although invented (if that's the right word) in Germany in the late 19th century, it was first produced commercially in the early 1900s in Burton-on-Trent.  It is of course concentrated brewer's yeast, and Burton was - and to a certain extent still is - a major centre of beer brewing and therefore provided an easy source of the basic material.

Who???

A group of us talking the other day about what we would do if we had a time machine.  It was inevitable that sooner or later someone would say that they would go back to when Hitler was an infant, and kill him - thus avoiding the Second World War and all its associated nastiness.  But assuming that the adult Hitler's non-existence would indeed have prevented WWII, you then have to face the paradox that, if there were no World War II, you would have no reason here in the present to go back in time and kill Hitler!

Oh, boy!

Another of those problems which can drive you mad -
(1) A man has two children.  The elder is a boy.  What's the probability that both are boys?
(2) A women has two children.  At least one is a boy.  What is the probability that both are boys?
      OK, if you have two children, there are four possibilities (B for boy, G for girl) - BB, BG, GB or GG. In case (1) we can eliminate GB and GG, so we're left with two possibilities, both equally likely, and the probability that they are both boys is therefore 1 in 2.  In case (2) the only one we can eliminate is GG, so we have three possibilities, and therefore the probability that both are boys is 1 in 3.  But how can knowing the order of birth make a difference?  The chance of any given child being a boy is 50-50 surely? - well close to, anyway.   Where did we go wrong - did we go wrong?  More to come....

One step forward, or two steps back?

Sir David Attenborough has recently articulated a theory that has been buzzing around in my mind for some time.  It's not a very nice theory, I warn you now.  It goes like this - Darwin's theory of evolution is based upon the "survival of the fittest", but the other side of this coin is the non-survival of the not-fittest.  In other words, for a species to evolve, the fittest must survive, but equally the weakest must die out.  But as far as humankind is concerned, advances in medical science mean that babies who a hundred - maybe even fifty - years ago would have died, are now surviving.  Like I say, it's not a nice thing to think about, but is this trend interfering with what otherwise would be the natural evolution of humanity? Might we stop evolving - maybe even regress to a weaker, more debilitated species? 

How do you spell that?

I expect many of you know the story that Cinderella's "glass slipper" is down to a confusion as the story was passed down over the years between the old French word vair (fur) and the modern French verre (glass).  More recently there have been doubts expressed about this theory, but I rather like it and hope it's true.  But did you know that a similar confusion between two ancient Greek words has given us Pandora's Box, which should by rights be Pandora's Jar?

Oh no - not again!

I occasionally post "couldn't make it up" stories, but at least you would hope that lessons would be learned and you wouldn't get the same sort of idiocy repeated. But remember the story a couple of years ago of the railway station worker who was facing possible disciplinary action for going down onto the track to remove a shopping trolley which could have derailed an oncoming train?  Plus ça change and all that - a disabled woman in a wheelchair fell from a railway station platform on to the track.  A train was due in a matter of minutes.  One of the station workers jumped down and, with the help of other passengers, lifted her and her chair back onto the platform.  You've guessed it - he has been suspended for "failing to follow correct safety procedures" and could be disciplined.  I despair, I really do.

Wait for it...

The Opposition are making the point - quite correctly - that although the indicators are that the economy is on the mend, people are not seeing any improvement in their standard of living.  I think this is down to what I think of as the "supertanker effect".  If you turn the wheel on a supertanker, there will be a significant delay before the ship starts to change course.  If you think back to 2007/8 I think you may well remember that there was this period when the news was full of doom and gloom, and yet you couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about, because as far as you were concerned, life was going on pretty well as normal.  It wasn't until a few months later that you started to feel the pain in your wallet.  Well, now we have the reverse effect - the news is better, but it will probably not be until well into next year that it will percolate down to household level.

Sleight of hand?

If you're trying to convince somebody of something which you can't prove, then one strategy is to take a closely associated subject which you can prove and keep throwing that at them in the hope that the fact that you can prove that will confuse them into thinking that you have proved the other.  This is exactly what the US (and to a lesser extent ourselves) are doing over this business of chemical weapon attacks in Syria.  We are being bombarded with images of people, and in particular children, suffering from the effects of what is probably sarin gas.  But this is the associated subject - nobody is really denying that sarin gas was used and that these people are the victims.  The question of course is who perpetrated the attack?  The US (and to a lesser extent ourselves) would like you to believe that it was the Assad regime who did this, and they may be right  - but where is their proof?  The US Secretary of State keeps saying "we know" this, that and the other, which to me is just code for "you'll have to take my word on this - trust me".  Now let me think - trust what a self-serving politician is telling me....?  Er...No.

Once bitten....?

You may have heard of the building in London which, because of its glass-covered concave shape, is reflecting and concentrating the sun's rays and causing severe scorching at the focal point - apparently it's blistered paintwork, burnt carpet and even fried an egg.  Whoops, you may think - until you find out that the same architect designed a similar building some years ago in Las Vegas, with exactly similar problems.  Talk about learning from past experience??

Missing the point?

The PM was apparently upset by some Kremlin official being reported as saying that Britain is "just a small island that nobody pays attention to".  So he went to some length to list Britain's achievements over the centuries.  But so what, is the obvious response - nobody is denying what Britain has done in the past - even though the PM did at times rather over-egg the pudding.  The question is, what clout do we have in the world today?  And you have to admit, the answer is - not much.   I think we are still seen by some as a sort of "elder statesman" whose views should be listened to politely even if then ignored.  But let's be clear - we are no longer one of the big boys.

Card game.

Earlier this year I read "The Kite Runner" - not my usual sort of thing at all, but one of my grandchildren had to study it for GCSE so thought it might help.  There's a point in the book where the main character and his mate play cards.  And as I read, I thought "I know this game - or at least something very like it".  We used to play it in Germany - National Service.  We called it "Droog", but I've never heard of it since. Anyway my recollection is - standard pack of cards, each player is dealt five.  Next card is turned up to designate trump suit, and the rest form the stock pile.  Player to dealer's left starts. He can play one, three or five cards to the table.  If he plays three, two of them must be a pair.  If he plays five, four must be two pairs or four of a kind. Next player must now try and "kill" as many of the cards played as he can (or wants to).  You can kill a card by playing a higher one of the same suit, or a trump. A card which is killed, and the card that killed it are put to one side and play no further part in the game. Any card which the player is unable (or unwilling) to kill must be picked up and added to his hand.  If either player now has less than five cards (which the first one obviously must have), they must top up their hand to five from the stock pile - if there's any left.  If second player has killed all the cards, he then leads to the next hand by playing one, three or five to the table - if not, the next player in turn leads and and the game proceeds in the same way.  Object is to be first to get rid of all your cards.  We played for money of course - everybody anted into a pot which went to the winner.

Left hand, right hand??

Do I understand this correctly?  On the one hand the Government intend to stop pupils retaking GCSEs over and over again in the hope of improving their grades - I think the rule is that you can have one retake and then that's it.  But on the other hand, the latest Government proposal is that if you don't get at least a C in maths and English at GCSE, you will have to continue studying those subjects and retaking the exams until you do.  Seems a bit contradictory.

Did you get it?

I'm afraid yesterday's post was a bit self-indulgent.  I found it amusing, but I imagine that there will be plenty of you who will have wondered what it was all about.  So - Heisenberg was a German physicist who is best known for his "Uncertainty Principle" which says (among other things) that as far as sub-atomic particles are concerned, you can know their velocity (how fast they are going) or their position (where they are) but not both at the same time.  Now read the joke again.

Ha ha (??)

Heisenberg is out driving when he is pulled over by the police.
"Do you know how fast you were going?" asks the officer.
"No, but I know where I am" replies Heisenberg.
"You were doing 80" says the officer.
"Now I'm lost" says Heisenberg

Book post

(see post of 18/11/06)

Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London - 6
Chris Ewan - Safe House - 7
John Grisham - The Associate - 7.5 
James Patterson - Jack & Jill - 7 
Ed McBain - Ax(e) - 7.5
John Grisham - The Confession - 7
Jim Kelly - Death Toll- 6
Lee Child - Tripwire - 8
David Roberts - The More deceived - 6.5
Lisa Gardner - Hide - 9

Explanation.

Talked the other day about irrational numbers (0.999... remember?).  This is one of those words which have a "technical" meaning which is not the same as its everyday meaning.  In normal speech, irrational is used as a synonym for illogical or unreasonable, but in mathematics it has a specialised meaning based on the root word "ratio", which is a rather old-fashioned term for what today we would more likely call a fraction.  So an irrational number is simply one which cannot be expressed as a ratio, a fraction.  So any number which you can't write in the form of a/b (where a and b are integers - whole numbers) is an irrational number.

I can breathe easier today.

Do you feel humiliated as a result of Thursday's vote against taking military action against Syria?  Well, I don't.  I think that for once Parliament - quite possibly for all the wrong reasons - got it right and accurately reflected what the majority of the country felt.  And isn't that what they're supposed to do?  We're well out of it.  If the Americans want to play "white hat, black hat" let them get on with it.  They claim to have the evidence to justify military intervention, but then, they were certain Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, weren't they?