Strangely Perfect

Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami Following this morning’s (using GMT) earthquake just off Japan (now set at 8.8 on the Richter Scale, but it keeps rising as more information is analysed), I noticed that the Google search page has a Tsunami warning for all to see. I thought I’d capture it for posterity. Enormity This truly [...]

Introduction Two items on today’s news demonstrated the vast contrasts in our humanity. Stardust probe finds ‘subdued’ comet crater & Japan halts whale hunt after chase by protesters. Our Absolute Ingenuity and Progress The absolute ingenuity of us humans and how far we have come since our cave-dwelling days is supremely demonstrated by the return [...]

Heysel and Beyond Being justifiably upset by the events at the Heysel Stadium many years ago, the recent comments on a video I made about it … … on the 25th anniversary of the awful event made me recall some TV reporting of what was reputedly  to be a Juventus “fan” brandishing a gun on [...]

How Summer Camps Could Change Britain by Christopher M. Green (Convenor of the Summer Camps Forum and Founding Director of The ATE Trust) Download Links to Original Chris Green Articles: Letter to MPs February 2010 Suggested letter format to lobby your local MP on behalf of Chris Green’s summer camps’ initiative. How Summer Camps …inline [...]

It’s Just Like Bladerunner, And Not Just the Weather! Tears in Rain Bladerunner, the movie, based on an old Philip K Dick science-fiction story, was made by Ridley Scott from North-East England, someone I’m distantly related to.  Made in 1982, it presents a very grey, wet, bleak future, heavily referencing Scott’s (and my own!) upbringing [...]

No Problem The towns of Workington and Cockermouth are now effectively isolated because all the bridges are down, washed away in the floods. However, they are ONLY bridges, and bridges can be made and rebuilt.  The problem is the lack of communications for the towns and surrounding villages, which affects everything, not least the provision [...]

Is Nuclear power Safe? Watch how the politicians duck and dive. Watch how they pick and choose which bits of ‘science’ to believe! Last week, smiley Alan Johnson fell out with serious Professor Nutt because the professor said some factual scientific things, things proven by statistics and analysis to have an overwhelming degree of proof.  [...]

Like a metal mickey, old Geordie Gordon Moore (no, not him of Intel and his ‘law’) has astounded the medical profession with the recent discovery that a big hole in his head has grown back under the protective metal plate that was inserted to fill the gap.  (see the story here: Man grows new skull [...]

How Bad was Thatcher’s Recession compared to the Current Economic Slump? Q. Well, how would you find out, exactly? A. Surprisingly easily.  This graph here compares historical economic slumps with the current one, on a month by month basis.  It’s taken from the “National Institute of Economic and Social Research” (NIESR) website here.  Notionally, it’s [...]

Continuing on From…  What Killed Flight AF 447 Since the search for the ‘black boxes’ of Flight 447 was abandoned a few days ago (20th Aug 2009 – see news item),  only 3 days later, Nature’s On-line version has published reports of the jet things I was going on about in my first article about [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

Crikey! I Never Realised! Maybe certain days have relevance above their station and mere numerical nomenclature?  Who knows.  So read on.  See what happened today! 622 AD  – The Hijra of Muhammad Muhammad runs away from Mecca to escape persecution.  From this point forward, huge swathes of the globe took up Islam, Islamic empires spread [...]

New Jaguar XJ In common with most cars like this, it’s a lovely looking machine – a style marvel; sleek and vapid, mercurial. It’s also a waste of space and a waste of effort. It’s two tonnes of mass for a 400kg payload is pants.  An ecological disaster zone. Money for Old Rope Not only [...]

Why Economists and Scam Merchants are the Same Today’s news that the cost of the global credit crunch meltdown has quadrupled in a year should come as no surprise to followers of the GoogleTreasureChest scamsters.  See : Meltdown losses of ‘$4 trillion’ Last year, the highly salaried ‘professional’ economists at the IMF, many having spent [...]