The 80/20 Rule

Facebook | Name the Greenpeace Whale Mohammed

Greenpeace are holding a nice little public vote, inviting us all to 'name a whale'.

Alas, they've restricted the voting choices to a fairly pathetic list of 30, including:

- Gana: means 'song' in Hindi
- Manami: means 'love of the sea' in Japanese
- Nurani: means 'conscience in Bahasa Indonesia

Despairing at this load of tree-hugging rubbish, I've started a new Facebook group;

Facebook | Name the Greenpeace Whale Mohammed

The intention is to get everyone to write in to Greenpeace to encourage them to consider a new, more topical name.

I'm waiting for the email that informs me that my Facebook account has been suspended :-)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: GillianGibbons, Mohammed, Sudan, Greeenpeace

Scrounging by default

So, the government has 'lost' the personal details of millions of families in the UK. Ho Hum.

This 'crisis' (the most over used word of the age) serves to demonstrate only two things to me, one surprising, one not.

The unsurprising is that governments tend towards incompetence, all governments.

The surprising? That there are 25 million children on child benefit. Call me old fashioned but I had always assumed that the welfare state existed for the benefit of the poor. Are we all so poor now that the families of 25 million children must claim state support in the raising of children? No, for child benefit is one of those that does not require means testing, you get it by default as the government cannot be bothered to find out who, if anyone, actually needs it - resulting in the spraying around of my money to rich and poor alike.

What a sorry State we are in. On one hand we are physically attached at birth to that destroyer of individual responsibility, pride and initiative; the teat of the welfare state. On the other hand we have a system of government financing that takes huge amounts of money away from families via an absurdly over complicated tax regime and then doles parts of that money back to those same families via an absurdly over complicated benefits and welfare system, pausing only to waste a large portion of it in between.

And yet throughout this whole fiasco I'm hard pressed to find anyone who comments on the absurdity of the welfare machine, merely the incompetence of its operators. That is the real 'crisis'.

Missing the point of the iPhone

Ahead of the UK launch of the iPhone this week there's been a whole rash of "iPhone will fail" type articles appearing in the UK press (we love it when things fail), including one in the Observer yesterday that contains a quote I've seen repeated in a number of the daily papers today:

"Stephen Pentland, director of Telecoms and Media Strategy at Deloitte, said: 'I don't think it's going to be a huge seller. There are a number of other phones on the market which have similar functions at a significantly lower price.'"

Apple faithful dial M for mutiny | Technology | The Observer

Kind of missing the point isn't it? Phone 'functionality' has never been a sales driver in the mass-phone (as opposed to business phone) market. The drivers are fashion and desire and Apple are king of the hill when it comes to crafting an emotional connection between the users and their hardware.

Lack of 3G and a relatively poor camera will prevent me from buying one, no matter how much I love the interface but these are peripheral concerns to the majority to *want* this phone like they want no other.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Apple, iPhone, UK

Criticizing God

No, not the guy with the robes and the big bushy beard who sounds like Charlton Heston, the secular substitute we use here in the U.K.

Evidently Rudy Gulliani has been less than complementary about our wonderful envy-of-the-world NHS. Says the former Mayor of New York:

"My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and, thank God, I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent. My chance of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent under socialized medicine."

"No fair" cry the defenders of one of the industrialized world's worst healthcare systems. I heard some pompous prat on the BBC say earlier this evening:

"It is unfair to compare prostate cancer statistics in Britain with those in the US because there the cancer is more likely to be diagnosed in its early stages"

Admittedly I'm a layman but I would have thought that diagnoses and prevention was part of the healthcare process, no?

"It's unfair to compare plane crash rates in Britain with those in the US because there they try and prevent the planes from crashing by performing regular maintenance."

"It's unfair to compare exam pass rates in Britain with those in the US because there they give lessons to pupils before the exams ... sometimes for years"

Cats

F***ing cats and their f***ing s**t. How the hell do you get rid of the little buggers? Every cat in the neighbourhood seems to have decided that my gravel driveway is their litterbox.

I'm getting close to having to use nuclear options to dissuade them. My most recent (and most long lasting) deterrent has been Chilli powder, bought in bulk from the local Indian. But after some months of success my furry, spit-covered foes seem to have developed an immunity, perhaps even an addiction. I'm pretty sure I've seen some of them hanging around the local off-licence trying to pick up some lager.

The powder and liquid offerings of the DIY stores are completely useless, you just end up looking like a complete tit, wandering up and down the driveway with a capfull of expensive granules, trying to figure out how much you are supposed to scatter per square metre. And then it rains and you have to start all over again.

What marketing genius decided to put on the shelves a garden product rendered immediately useless by a few spots of rain? In Britain?!?

Obviously one who has a fondness for repeat sales ... and letter bombs.

So now I'm moving into the electronic age with a device which evidently emits an ultrasonic sound that drives cats away. Some hope.

An expert speaks

If you're a regular watcher of what passes for news on the BBC these days you'll often see Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, invited to give his opinion on political developments in middle east.

As a BBC 'friend' he's rarely pressed on whether his own views might colour his analysis, which is a shame as they are quite enlightening.

Next time the BBC puts on one if its comfy little panels on the middle east (you know the sort of thing, a balanced lineup consisting of someone from the centre, someone from the left, someone from the extreme left) and Abd Al-Bari Atwan is wheeled out, I wonder if he'll be asked about this interview he gave to Lebanese TV?

"If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight."

It's easy to see why the BBC holds him in such high regard. I wonder if he made an appearance in the Balen Report? I guess we'll never know.

A big hole....

Evidently there's a big load of nothing out there, over which scientists are puzzling:

"Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across.

There really is nothing to the void, which is empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen "dark matter" that astronomers detect by its gravitational pull."

The authors of the paper in the Astrophysical Journal (Shea Brown, Liliya Williams and Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota) who have 'discovered' the hole after studying data from the VLA Sky Survey comments that:

"Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6-10 billion light-years from Earth"

My goodness, what are they teaching at university these days? The explanation is obvious ... that bit of the universe hasn't been rendered yet.

Foodie hell.

Having just had a close call with a food 'experience' I find myself becoming almost obsessed with the way in which modern food is beginning to mimic the trajectory of modern art.

Like Hurst, Emin and Co, it's almost as if chefs (or 'cooks' as we used to call them before they all got their own TV programmes) have tired of the effort needed to prepare traditional 'real' food correctly and decided instead to turn customer confusion into a competitive sport.

With the brazenness and slight of hand of a music hall magicians, restaurants compete to offer the weirdest and most unlikely combination of foods in the safe knowledge that the stranger the dish, the less likely the customer is to have had any previous experience against which to judge it. After all, if you've never tried pickled sheep's eyes on a bed of frog-snot ice cream garnished with venezualan goat-hoof scrapings how are you to know if the dish you're presented with has been carefully crafted by a team of professionals toiling away on the cutting edge of culinary technology or thrown together by a couple of art school drops outs in silly hats, laughing themselves stupid in the kitchen at the gullibility of their customers?

Let's face it, no matter how much you gush to your friends about your extraordinary foodie adventures, it's unlikely that you're ever going to spend that much money again on that particular ridiculous dish at that particular absurd restaurant, so even the narrowest of comparisons within the same establishment is ruled out. After all, what true explorer wants to re-visit previous conquests, when there are new vistas of artfully arranged unlikely food combinations to explore?

And if the dish is 'unique' (in our mass produced age unique is the new black) you'll never be able to compare it with another chef's 'interpretation', particularly if it has been copyrighted.

I'm in the middle of a personal backlash against this tripe, I wonder if a wider backlash is in the offing? Who cares? I certainly don't, I'm off home for bangers and mash.

Imagine my surprise....

Interesting story on BBC radio a couple of nights ago, based on a report in the Lancet Oncology, about cancer survival rates in the developed world .

The item (on the 6PM news, Radio 4) noted that despite massively increased investment in the NHS, our survival rates for cancer still lagged below those of European countries.

At first I thought this was just another example of our 'glorious' NHS failing to live up to the expectations placed upon it by taxpayers. Then I looked at the study.

Although you wouldn't know from the radio report which, by mentioning only European survival rates, gave the impression that the table was topped by European countries, our friends at the BBC had neglected to give the full picture. Let's illustrate with a couple of representative paragraphs from the online version of this story on the BBC website:

"Overall, for men Sweden had the best survival rates with 60% of cancer patients alive five years after diagnosis, compared to between 40% and 50% for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland."

"For women, Sweden and Iceland were top on 62% with Wales, England and Northern Ireland just below the European average of 56%, while Scotland was among the worse on 48%"

So, according the BBC, the key bits of the table looks like this:

Sweden 60.3%
Wales 47.9%
England 44.8%
N. Ireland 42%
Scotland 40.2%

But as be seen from the Telegraph story on the same report, the BBC has missed out a bit at the top:

United States 66.3%
Sweden 60.3%

Simple error of omission? I think not. How embarrassing it would be for the socialised, tax-funded BBC to admit that the great satan's evil private healthcare system is the best bet for cancer survival?

As with so much that comes from the BBC, if it doesn't fit the narrative, it doesn't get reported.

Bye Bye Scotland

English voters, says Alex Salmond:

"...will be given no say over proposals that could end the 300-year-old union with Scotland.."

I can't help but think that clever Alex is missing a trick here as there's a good chance that, if included in his 'conversion', English voters would vote very enthusiastically for Scottish/English independence.