Category: Techo stuff

Mea culpa?

Time was when cricketers walked, snooker champs owned up and, yes, golfers retired when they broke a rule. The gentlemen’s code, as far as I know, never extended to tennis or any of the foootball or hockey variants – in which hoodwinking the ref has become de rigueur, nay a practised skill. Remember Bloodgate and the iconic Dean Richards? But luckily hawkeyed gadgetry is slowly replacing the human eye and on Friday a telly viewer caught Tiger woods cheating – not on his latest blonde this time but on the fringes of the 15th green during the US Masters. He later stated he’d chosen to ‘drop’ a couple of yards back to get a better lie. No behavioural change there then.

Do I care? Should you? Not really, except to bewail the loss of honesty among our heroes. But, hey! All’s fair in love, sport and war and you can’t trust a superpower to play nicely with his drones anymore .

NIMBY politics

HMS AstuteIt’s rather a facile option for small countries to declare themselves ‘nuclear free’. Denmark has done it and the SNP will do it on behalf of a ‘free’ Scotland. But such posturing ignores the realities of life in the 21st C. (Every day for example Denmark may choose to buy electricity from neighbouring countries which run nuclear power stations – only confirming the hypocrisy of its policies.) Militarily, the western alliance (or NATO) ‘protects’ both territories by dint of their membership (unless the Scots go 100% neutral) and uses nuclear weapons to secure such protection. So when Iran and North Korea threaten Europe, as well they might, will the Lilliputians expect special dispensation from nuclear attack or eventual occupation? Maybe,  but only total political neutrality will guarantee that. That’s the dilemma. They surely wish to be seen as supporters of European values and defenders of their own – but not, it seems, at any price or ‘in my back yard’. And would any rogue state misguided enough to launch a nuclear attack respect the nuclear neutrality of such defenceless people? I doubt it.

Three bags full, Ma’am

Remember the picture I posted?
The house in the wood wot we love?
Well the paperwork’s going quite smoothly
And we’re fixing a date for the move.

I’ve got to admire Mrs Janus –
For her architect’s eye and her skill
At turning the place into ‘our’ place,
Saying where there’s a way there’s a will.

And a bonus I’ve found in the detail
Gives a boost to a roy’list like me.
Them woods wot surround our new palace
Belong to the Queen. Te he hee.

Getting the low-down

I took a wee foray north again today, only to find that flying out of Edinburgh can be a challenging experience. Some passengers are ‘selected’ to undergo a full-body-scanner check – which except for exhibitionists (especially the extremely well-appointed) is surely a sufficient invasion of one’s privacy – followed by a ‘voluntary’ questionnaire seeking personal information including one’s religion. Unfortunately there seems some doubt whether the staff always get round to mentioning it’s voluntary.

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Space but not a lot

Still riding high after our week in Prague, Mrs J and I have spotted another get-away-from-it-all opportunity; this time an all-expenses-paid adventure offering travel, see-sighting (Mrs J’s word) and, best of all, celebrity – especially designed for the mature couple. Yes, it’s Mars and back with no interference from tour-guides, cabin crew, windmills, or LibDem canvassers.

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Weathermania

It’s an A for anabatic and a B for beaver’s tail,
With a C for coriolis and a D for downdraft hail.
El Nino Southern Oscillation, fogbow’s visibility.
Gustinado, glaciation, a hodograph, helicity.

Please excuse my insolation, intertropical I’d say.
Jet streaks all around; and graphed the kilopascal way.
Lenticular, the lapse-rate, mamma clouds and mesonets,
Northern lights and NGMs will end in orographic sweats.

Beware the popcorn (sic) convection; pressure sometimes causes that.
Psychrometric intervention; rossby waves both shear and flat.
Theta-e, a turkey tower, an ultraviolet extreme;
UTC and UVV, with a gentle warm advective stream.

Old X is out of favour here but yougs and yellow winds prevail.
Zones and zulu time, the solar zodiac brings up the tail.
You’ll wonder what on god’s own earth (!) this catalogue of terms can be?
I don’t count sheep. I list like this the words of meteorology.

Church vs. Church and others

It was bound to happen. A gene expert at Harvard (USA) reckons he can create a neanderthal person with some nifty lab work – and a little help from a homo sapiens female. Pretty clever, huh? Now I reckon it’s a first – an attempt to reverse the flow of human evolution, instead of all that effort to speed up its normal progress with prize-winning science and politically-correct social engineering. (Talking of which you’ll be relieved to know that the latest citizenship test for wannabe Brits would almost ceratinly outlaw half of the present incumbents, were they lucky enough to take part.)

Neanderthal Museum, Mettman, Germany

Frankly I’m shocked that Head Office in Rome and the PoW hisself haven’t mustered their legions to attack the Harvard heretic. How dare he play god, a privilege reserved for crown and clergy?

But what say you? Wouldn’t a few neandertals come in handy for light housework and other duties beneath One’s station? Definitely.

All for Nothing

It was early in the fifth century, although nobody seemed too sure about exactly how early,  when Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short perhaps? Let’s call him Den. for short) was asked by his boss Pope John 1 to calculate the date of Easter for the next few years because the previous calculation only went as far as about 500 when the World was expected to end. (some of this may sound vaguely familiar)

Continue reading “All for Nothing”