Builders, building a building

Thanks to those who have commented to the effect that my absence has been noted. I have been on holiday.

Because I have a number of commitments in the immediate future (now including, rather to my surprise, retaining an architect and rebuilding the less satisfactory parts of the Villa Underclass) blogging will be highly intermittent, if not entirely absent, for some months.

I have to say that I don’t really believe that my failure reliably to harrumph at the nefarious machinations of the professional political class will make a lot of difference, to be quite honest.

It would be nice to say that I am taking time off to construct a space vehicle in which to emigrate to a more sensible planet but unfortunately I seem to have mislaid the relevant supplier’s catalogue.

My readers (bless you both) will probably have to content themselves for a while with an occasional rant or two about the construction business.

Speaking of which.

Once upon a time (quite a long time ago) there was a fellow who has having an extension built. It was the school holidays, so his daughter (6) was being kept amused by helping the builders. She would pick up a brick, and put it down on the other pile. Then she would pick up another. Soon the bricks were all somewhere else.

At the end of the week the builders got paid, and the fellow (being her dad) said that since she had helped the builders all week, she too should be paid, and gave her a £5 note.

At which point her mum (being her mum) said that she ought to open a savings account and put the £5 in it.

So (dutifully but not without some regret) she was taken by her mum to the building society, which conveniently provided suitable accounts.

“Five pounds,” said the lady in the building society, helping her to fill in the forms, “That’s quite a lot. And will you be helping the builders again next week?”

“No.”

“Oh. Not at all?”

“No. Well. Not unless them fcuking bricks arrive.”

Metaklett

How would we manage without the Germans?

Who else would think of steel velcro?

Narrow escape for Royal Navy

The BBC (caveat more or less everyone), found by Boing Boing, alleges that the Dutch government is trying to prevent a (literally) born sailor from sailing.

Once upon a time Miss Dekker’s ambition would have been celebrated (despite having been to the Netherlands I can’t remember whether or not they ever had an equivalent of Blue Peter) as evidence of the ‘diversity’ of the numerous accomplishments demonstrated by the Dutch.

Unfortunately nowadays ‘diversity’ no longer has this meaning; it now appears to mean ‘everyone, regardless of their race, colour, creed, gender alignment, etc. etc. ad naus being hammered down flush into identical, politically-determined cultural forms from which individual ambition and achievement are rigorously excluded’.

I suppose that though we British, groaning under the same yoke, might sympathise with Miss Dekker personally, we might comfort ourselves with the thought that at least now she won’t be sailing up the Medway and burning the Royal Navy in its own dockyard, like one of her predecessors.

How many Eurobureaucrats does it take to change a light bulb?

Such irony. Once upon a time it seemed likely that forcing people to buy, and then to pay to dispose of, compact fluorescent lamps would be highly profitable for certain people in the EU, such as Messrs. Philips of the Netherlands, who manufacture them, and the mysterious organisations which arrange their safe disposal (they being rather more hazardous than the average waste).

Of course the lumbering, self-serving bureacracy of the EU takes forever to do anything.

So the measures now being put in place to coerce people into using this really rather twentieth-century lighting technology, in order to maximise the profit of the EU’s proprietors, were conceived some time ago.

What has happened since is that the designs of Philips and others (on Wikipedia, of course, it says that the thing was invented by, and stolen from, a lone American genius; if only the Cold War were still on there would be a Warsaw Pact version of Wikipedia, in which everything was invented by, and stolen from, a Russian) have long since been copied by the Chinese.

Who, it turns out, (thanks to Apocalypse Nowish) are now limiting exports of rare-earth metals.

The triphosphor coatings which give CFLs their good colour indices are ‘made with’, as the litigious world now insists we say, rare-earth salts, particularly those of europium.

So one might expect the ability of Philips and others to manufacture triphosphors (also used in modern fluorescent tubes) to be somewhat affected by this, perhaps to the extent of leaving the market to the Chinese (which must be the latter’s intention).

Of course, the anonymous Eastern European billionaire who owns all of the CFL recycling facilities in Europe will find his profits unaffected.

What I wonder is: how (when this penny eventually drops) will the EU continue to protect his profits, and the associated brown envelopes, from the light-emitting diode?

My money’s on a health-scare. Any other bets?

Not good enough

According to The Register there are secret police ANPR cameras operating in Torquay, Brixham and Dawlish.

As good a reason as any not to visit any of those places. Torquay is out anyway.

ELDERLY LADY What is that?
BASIL FAWLTY That is Torbay, madam.
ELDERLY LADY Well, it’s not good enough.
['Fawlty Towers']

Ho, ho. Very satirical

It tells on Slashdot, from New Scientist,
How easy ’tis to fool the credulous
Who, full convinced that none can change his style
To superstition’s regiment now add
‘Stylometry’; and, not content with that
Extend full legal credence to the same.

Good people all, attend to my advice,
For, when your MP’s fortune you must tell,
Informing them that all their crimes are known,
And that piano-wire is in stock,
Miss not the chance to make it that bit worse:
Your ‘threatening letter’ should be in blank verse.

“Vitamin pills… pep pills… tranquiliser pills…”

['Dr. Strangelove']

Obliged to Henry for the cure for (and prophylaxis against) swine, or any other species of, flu.

It corresponds quite closely to Mrs. Underclass’ traditional remedy, though to heroic doses of vitamin C she usually adds what she describes as a ‘hot toddy’, the recipe for which she does not disclose, but the fumes from which will remove saffron from stainless steel.

Yet more interesting is his prescription for cholesterol. He advises against statins. I managed to snap an NHS cardiologist right out of his half-asleep prescribing-routine by declining a prescription for these things, explaining to his satisfactorily amusing horror that I thought it was probably inappropriate for me to become dependent upon any more drugs at my time of life.

Instead, at the insistence of my GP, I tried a modern alternative (stanol esters). This is (a) very expensive and (b) quite repellent. After six months of it, my cholesterol count had worsened.

Henry suggests instead:

Vitamin B3 Niacin Modified release tablets. 1-2 grams at night… Also take Co enzyme Q 10 100mg-300mg and 1000mg Vitamin C twice daily… Ignore me at your peril.

I shall try to obtain some supplies of these items and see what happens. Of course, as one of Henry’s commenters points out, such things will not be allowed for much longer to compete with the pharmaceutical industry and its state-funded marketing arm.

Pseudoscience

Just in case anyone doesn’t read the comments, here is a quote, usually attributed to Lord Kelvin:

“What I always say is that if one can measure the thing one is talking about, and express it in numbers, then one knows something about it, but if one cannot measure it, nor express it in numbers, then one’s knowledge is of a poor and unsatisfactory kind, and one has scarcely, in one’s thoughts, progressed to the stage of Science, whatever the matter may be.”

It is on this basis that I think that there is no purpose in attempting to argue about the heritability of intelligence. Since it cannot be measured (or even defined with any degree of plausibility), nobody will ever know.

The vehemence of the comments provoked by my mere suggestion, under the title of ‘Advocatus Diaboli’, that there was no evidence to prove that intelligence could not be inherited leads me to suppose that I may have discovered the thing which one is actually not allowed to mention on the internet.

Since I was unaware of this regulation I’d be obliged if those enforcing it would provide some indication of its limits, since it is somewhat disconcerting to be compared so readily and volubly with the Nazis should one inadvertantly exceed them.

Interestingly, on returning to Dr. Gabb’s article, with a view to citing what seemed to me to be a quite off-topic rant (in the middle of an article, otherwise not incoherent, about the NHS), about which all this originally was, I find that the relevant paragraph has now been deleted, and replaced with:

Paragraph here deleted. I don’t withdraw from the position advanced, but feel that it is irrelevant to the main point of the essay

The thing about this is that a new reader will have no idea what ‘the position advanced’ was. Having read it only briefly before it disappeared, it seemed to me to combine elements of truth (yes, unusually brave people are selectively removed from the gene-pool by warfare, it’s rather hard to deny it) with, frankly, poppycock.

I am particularly impatient with pseudoscience. I have concentrated until now on ‘global warming’, since it is the latest nonsense upon which people are trying to base public policy. Nobody has, fortunately, attempted to base public policy on ‘eugenics’ for some time, but if the only way to stop people from ranting in the comments about Auschwitz is to bang out a few posts rubbishing it, then the commenters have only to say the word. I feel that to be fair I ought to do UFOs too.

Pah

Man Widdicombe reports a new government campaign about ‘drug-driving’.

I can’t play back the video clip so I shall have to imagine it. Of course it is about wicked, evil recreational drugs, isn’t it?

Not about the millions and millions of people driving to and fro every day with their NHS-prescribed happy-pills in their pocket, the label clearly saying ‘if affected, do not drive or operate power machinery’?

Pah.

Advocatus diaboli

Cat-counter Ian B gives Dr. Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance both barrels, with a couple of reloads, for this:

…intelligence and general ability seem for the most part to be inherited…

Not wishing to incite Ian B to further wrath, I will not of course for one moment suggest that intelligence can be inherited.

However, I would call his attention to the well-known Bach family, whose history suggests quite strongly to me the impression that musical ability, in some cases at least, may be.

Furthermore, I have been assured by a succession of doctors that the reason why I am susceptible to skin cancer is that, like my mother, I have the skin-type of my Scots ancestors; my mother was told, on having something irregular removed from her nose, to “tell everyone in your family who has your skin-type that it is not a question of limiting exposure [to solar UV], but of preventing it entirely.”

So it would seem that some personal characteristics can in fact be inherited.

Though it would of course be utterly politically incorrect to suppose that intelligence is one of these characteristics (because the logical consequences of such a supposition are unacceptable), as advocatus diaboli I would have to say I’m damned if I can see any technical evidence which necessarily excludes it.

For myself, however, I would suggest that ‘intelligence’ is so difficult to define that it is quite impossible to measure adequately, and therefore that, though we may for whatever nefarious purpose achieve one mathematical result or another by manipulation of the logical premises, we shall probably never know for certain whether it (as opposed to carefully selected things which appear to be components of it) can be inherited or not.