Strangely Perfect

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 [...]

One Small Step for Man, one Giant Leap For Mankind When Armstrong said those words (except I missed out the ‘a’), it looked like men & women would be walking tall on all sorts of astronomical bodies in a continuation of the Apollo programme.  As we no know, things didn’t quite work out like that [...]

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 [...]

PreScript Advice If you think you’ve had your bank ‘cleaned out’ by any of a multitude of ‘life cleanse’ or ‘colon cleanse’ type internet scams, there is only one real remedy… Ask for a charge-back against the company through you credit card company. Your reason, when asked, is that the company has either: Not adhered [...]

Comparing The West and The East There is currently a world-wide flu epidemic and it’s interesting to compare the responses of various countries to it, with the historical pandemic of The Plague, i.e. the Black Death. Flu In the USA, it’s been called “Mexican Flu” sometimes quite pejoratively, especially at it’s outset and especially by [...]

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 [...]

Use .htaccess!!! *Ebook Admin/Secure Apache I’ve mentioned it before – and the technique I used to use a lot with a huge list of blocked IP addresses.  I then decided that the list was too time consuming to maintain and stopped using it except in extreme cases about the end of last year.  Such a [...]

It’s funny how things change and how the world has different perceptions of a people.  You see, people have long memories. Somali Pirates Vow Revenge on U.S., France on Rescues – is the news currently.  Also, the Somalis have taken pot-shots at a US politician in Mogadishu according to Voice of America. This all flies [...]

Highlighting the Differences in Public Health provision, the Attitudes to Death and Responsibilities of the State and the Individual to Public Welfare. The title is the biggest bit – trust me. Introduction This takes us from today’s news from America and the Duffy’s Cut project to a tiny hamlet in Northumberland, England, called Throckrington. Duffy’s [...]

In contrast to ‘What We Need Most’ , what we have now is astonishing progress in the field of genetic research and manipulation that ultimately will improve the live of people with specific conditions and also, it looks likely, everyone who’s ever had a bad tooth, filling, abscess, toothache or crown work will benefit. Cystic [...]

Following my little hit on Crawling Chaos tune nickers here google-security-to-crawling-chaos-and-morals/, the latest news is that a London woman, Isabella Barwinska, has been fined and costed a total of £16k! Pirated Dream Pinball 3D Draws £16,000 Payment Game sharers face legal crackdown Game sharer hit with £16,000 judgement The original case is reported here, which [...]

I’ve kept up with all the upgrades etc for WordPress and all the add-ons I use. But two days ago the internal stats system that is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/ stopped working. It took these last few days to sort but it turns out a key line was missing from my new theme, illacrimo. However, it turns out [...]