Ha ha

My retirement magazine came up with this one which I liked.  Actually, I've thrown the magazine away by now, but this is how I remember it - 
A barrister is defending a man on a charge of murder.  No body has ever been found.  He decides to use this fact to play a trick on the jury.  "Ladies and gentlemen" he says "I will prove the defendant is not guilty.  In precisely one minute the person supposed to have been murdered will walk through that door".  The jurors' eyes all turn to the door indicated.  A minute passes and nothing happens.  "OK" says the barrister "I made that up.  But the fact you all looked at the door shows that there is reasonable doubt in your mind that there ever was any murder.  I invite you to acquit".  The jury go out to consider their verdict and come back to announce they have found the defendant guilty.  Later the barrister buttonholes the jury foreman.  "How could you have convicted?" he says "I saw you all looking at the door".  "Yes" says the foreman "but your client didn't!"

Pays to keep a low profile.

One of the more bizarre predictions to come out of Einstein's general theory of relativity is that the higher above sea-level you go (strictly, the further you are away from the centre of the Earth), the faster time passes.  But thanks to two extremely, extremely accurate atomic clocks this has now been shown to be true - even though the clocks were positioned with one just a foot higher than the other, the higher one ran faster, albeit infinitesimally, than the other.  This of course means that if you live on the top floor of a tower block, you age faster than someone living at ground level!

Show me the money

The idea of re-writing the Ten Commandments to reflect modern language and thought has much to commend it, although replacing "thou shalt not steal" by "prosper with a clear conscience" seems to me to be rather dodging the issue, but the thing that struck a decidedly bum note with me is that, if you want to study these new Commandments it will cost you.  You'll have to shell out for a book or DVD or "tool kit" - anything from £30 upwards.  I don't recall God charging Moses.  Is this prospering with a clear conscience?

Here we go again

Speculation in the press and on the telly about what will be in the budget this month.  Many predictions contradict each other, which is a sure sign that these people are just guessing.  Based on a long lifetime of budgets, I would be very surprised if whatever the Chancellor puts forward leaves me significantly better or worse off - I think I've mentioned before that it tends to be "give with one hand, take away with the other". Actually the main plus point for me is that, thanks to inflation running at something like 5% last September, I should get a helpful increase in my pension.  Mind you, I've already received notice that some of my regular monthly payments will be going up significantly - like I say, give with one hand, take away with the other!

Confusion

There's one of those petitions on the Government's website - you know, the sort if they get 100,000 or more signatures it triggers the possibility of a debate in Parliament.  It was about giving a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing who was convicted of gross indecency with another man back in 1952 and subsequently committed suicide.  I've posted about this before (12/9/09) and perhaps in view of what I said then you won't be surprised that I enthusiastically added my name to the petition.  But then I thought - however much I might despise the way he was treated, how could he possibly be granted a pardon?  Like it or not, he was correctly convicted under the law as it then stood. So it seems to me that the petition is doomed to failure.  Gordon Brown when he was PM offered an apology for the way he was treated, and that is the best we can hope for.  The petition, by the way, currently stands at a little over 31,000 signatures.

Goal-line technology

Apparently Sepp Blatter has become a convert, so it's going to happen.  Some say it will spoil a game where traditionally the referee's decision has always been final.  Some say that without controversy, the game will lose its appeal - its passion.  I think you've got to be more hard-headed about this - it's not about the game, it is (regrettably) about money.  Take the current season - it is becoming more and more apparent that relegation from the Premiership is probably going to come down to three clubs out of five (and my club Wolves is unfortunately one of them).  So that's life, but relegation for any club is a massive financial hit, and the thought that this might depend on a dodgy goal-line decision by an unsighted referee just isn't on.  Where such enormous sums are involved we owe it to the clubs to ensure that a goal is a goal is a goal, and equally that a goal is not given where the ball has not wholly crossed the line.  Of course you could argue for technology to be used for penalty/free kick outside the box decisions as well, and maybe that will come in due course, although that's more difficult because it doesn't depend on where the ball is, so will need some sort of different approach.  On balance though, it's a step in the right direction.

Royaume Uni dix points?

The BBC's decision to choose Engelbert Humperdinck to sing for the U K in this year's Eurovision Song Contest may seem at first sight rather strange, but could in fact be quite a smart move.  Although his glory days over here are behind him, he is currently well known and popular in some of the Eastern European and Scandinavian countries who do not traditionally vote for us, so we might garner a few extra points on the back of his popularity in those areas.  Anyway, we can't do much worse than the last few years, can we?

You couldn't make it up, shiver me timbers.

A young lad with a passion for playing pirates has a skull and crossbones flag flying in his back garden.  Or make that "had" because the local council have insisted his parents remove it or face a fine.  It seems that under the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisement) Regulations (England) 2007 you are not allowed to fly any flag other than a national, supranational or county one without planning permission.  The mind once again boggles.

It's there - no, it's there - no it's there AND there!

Moore's Law dates back to the 1960s and states (putting it simply) that the speed at which computers work will double about every two years, but the news from IBM that they have created computer components using "quantum technology" if true will soon put this in the shade.  Theoretically, a quantum computer will be able to do an infinite number of calculations all at the same time.  And this is not, as you might think, good news.  The technology that keeps your bank details safe online and that protects your PIN number and such like, is based on encryption methods which rely on the fact that it would take so long to break them that nobody would ever bother trying.  But a quantum computer could break them more or less instantaneously - and where would that leave us?  I hope somebody is working on an answer.

Words - again.

Marriage is in the news again, thanks to a bit of a spat between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Equalities Minister.  It is of course all about same-sex partnerships - should they be called marriages?  I've had my say (see post dated 28/11/05) and I stand by what I said then.  However, as I have also mentioned on several occasions in these pages, language is a living thing - a constant work in progress - and if enough people start to call these relationships "marriages" and that usage comes to be generally accepted, then the word will change its meaning to reflect this, and in time dictionaries will follow suit.  I don't agree however with the Equalities Minister who suggests that this is a change which could be brought about by legislation.  I don't think you can - or should try to - force a definition on people by law.