Monday, 1 April 2019

What I'm Worth

The human body is an amazing thing, a collection of chemicals in the just the right mix and as this aching body of mine enters its 50th year in service today, i find out that the chemicals in it are worth £2,595.  
Sold as parts i would get £1,066 for my Hydrogen, Carbon £487, Phosphorus £297, Calcium £254, Potassium £178, Oxygen £164, Nitrogen £9 and £14 for all the other elements.
The 35oz phosphorus in my body would make 5 million matches, the 60z of potassium 421 bananas, 4oz of sodium 55 teaspoons of salt, 4oz chlorine or enough to clean 8ft of an Olympic swimming pools and 1.2 nails from my 0.3 oz of iron although the water content would be enough for 81.5 pints.
Since 1 April 1969 i have shed 36,497 pints of wee, 12,595 pints of sweat, 30 pints of tears, 6,111 lb of poo, 39,359 pints of farts and 420 eggs.
As breaking me up for spares wouldn't be enough to buy a decent second hand, my family have decided to keep me all together and shove birthday cake at me instead and see if the Nitrogen and Oxygen market picks up in next year.

BBC -  The Making of Me and You

Sunday, 31 March 2019

Signs You're A Poindexter

Most people consider themselves to be more intelligent than average but studies have shown that there are some very real signs that are indicative of intelligence.
A study in 2010 found that 'right-wing' adults had an average IQ of 95, while 'left-wing' adults had an average IQ 11 points higher of 106 although looking at some of the right wingers around at the moment seems 95 could be a bit high.
I am a bit anxious about including this one but another study argued that people with high intelligence are more prone to anxiety but i am a very trusting person so i will which just happens to be another trait of the highly intelligent.
A recent study by researchers from the University of Vienna found that black humour was linked to higher intelligence and i can't resist an off colour joke especially if it mocks religion which as studies show, is rejected by those with a few more brain cells than most.
Being an insomniac i have plenty of time to look at studies which find the brightest amongst us are night owls and because i am just too bone idle to write a long post, laziness is a sure fire sign of intelligence.
As a left wing nervous type who rejects religion and stays up late laughing at black comedies and can often be overheard saying 'can't someone else do it' doesn't make me more intelligent, just means that i am able to elucidate and avoid obfuscating people in my own quintessential way without attracting vitriol despite my perfunctory way which sometimes contains non sequitur statements
which by a splendid coincidence just happen to be the top six words also used by highly intelligent people.
Now if only i can somehow find a study that explains that brain boxes like playing punk music loudly and eating chocolate then i feel ready to tackle that Mensa challenge.

National Price Hike Day 2019

The money.co.uk website have worked out that with the nominal salary increased set at 3% as from April 1 and inflation at 2.2%, workers in the UK are expected to receive a 0.8 per cent real-term salary increase in 2019 which averages out to an extra £20 per month or £237 per year on the average income.
Unfortunately April 1 is also known as National Price Hike Day when the prices of everyday items are increased so how far will that extra £237 pay rise reach?
Prescription costs will go up by 20p from £8.80 to £9 (2.27%) and average water and sewerage bills will rise by an average of £8 to £415 (2%) while Royal Mail have announced the price of first-class and second-class stamps were going to increase by 3p (4.6%).
Air Passenger Duty is to increase by £16 (10%), The NHS charge for a dental check-up will increase by £1.10 (5%), mobile contract prices by 2.5%, the TV licence fee will increase by £4 to £154.50 (2.5%) and Sky will see an increase of £2 a month (5%).
Household in England faces a £78 hike in Council Tax (4.5%) and the cost of gas and electricity in the home will rise by 10% and car tax by 5% and standard Broadband costs are rising by £12 a year.
Throw in the amount of money people pay into workplace pensions will rise from 3% of their income to 5% and that everything else will be going up by 2.2% and that 3% extra in your wage packet isn't going to stretch anywhere at all.

The Future Not Looking So Bright

Recently becoming a grandmother, i look at the young boy lying in his crib and can't help wondering what my grandsons place in the World will be as machines continue to replace humans jobs in the World.
Autonomous driving may only be at the start but such is its progress that self-driving cars will easily surpass our own driving ability soon and that will translate into millions of professional drivers out of work.
Factories and production lines are almost a thing of the past, replaced by robots and machines who don't need breaks or paying and even aeroplanes only need a human to take off and land and that is only a matter of time before they can do them themselves. 
Machines are even writing songs and creating music now and there are developments in Health so if my grandson will never calculate faster, type faster, never drive better, make a diagnosis or even fly more safely than a robot then the future jobs available are rapidly dwindling.
The question must be then what can we do that a machine can't because in most areas we just can't compete with them no matter how much of a turn our education system takes, the three R's of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic will never be good enough against the bits and bytes of a machine who can calculate much faster and more accurately than any human brain.
We need to acknowledge that computers will always outsmart and outperform us and the pool of available jobs will continue to shrink until all we have left is employment where we either assist the machines doing the jobs we once did or put them right when they break down.
Maybe i'm just being cynical but the future isn't looking that bright for the employment prospects of today's infants.

Saturday, 30 March 2019

The Problem Of Reading Your News On Social Media

Being in everyday contact with teenagers and young adults over the past decade, something which has changed dramatically in that time is the use of Social Media, something which was relatively unheard of ten years ago. 
Social media has massively complicated things and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon and while leaving to one side the deplorable damage of online harassment and cyberbullying which is a huge problem in itself, the second most frequent thing i hear is the youth of today getting their news direct from social media rather than more traditional sources.
I was always of the opinion that people in general could tell 'fake news' from 'real news' but it seems they can't and they take at face value something they read on Face book or Twitter and are all to ready to believe it rather than find out for themselves, double sourcing as we call it in journalism, before believing it.
While it's probably due to wanting to believe something if it is negative or positive against a person you like or dislike, the effects are shaping how people see the world and some less than reliable media outlets are only making things worse.
The like of Fox News and the Murdoch press are reknown for being less than truthful but viewers and readers will take at face value what they spew out because they are 'the media' and they can be trusted.
In the UK the broadcast media is regulated by OFCOM who make sure that what UK viewers see is fair and balanced and it was they who removed FOX News from TV Platforms because they failed to reach the standards of honesty required.
The problem is that if individuals spend their lives exposed only to unreliable news sources, it doesn't augur well for society and debate and our politicians don't help because as we saw with The Iraq War and the Bush and Blair duo, they lie to reach their own ends.
Now we have Donald Trump who doesn't even try to hide his lies, he just repeats them enough times to drum them home and have them believed which means that the sources of reliable and honest news which you can trust is shrinking.
You can go online to blogs, face book or twitter feeds and find authors defending the lies which they have sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, repeated and that really isn't good for any of us.
Most dishearteningly is that the likes of FOX News and the UK tabloid press continuing to pollute the pool of journalism means that even those who diligently check their information are treated with suspicion and that suits anyone who for nefarious reasons, doesn't want the real truth out there.

Friday, 29 March 2019

No Russians In Trump White House

After years of rifling around in the dark recesses of Trump, Rober Mueller has concluded that he did not collude with the Russians to win the 2016 election.
With no photographs of Trump turning up with him dressed in a 'I Love Putin' t-shirt, wearing a Russian hat and eating a bowl of Russian caviar while playing the balalaika, the Democrat Party seems to be struggling to digest the most awful news that their President is not a Russian spy.
This has left many Americans facing an uncomfortable truth that they may just have elected their orange President the old fashioned way, by voting for him.
It must be a time of reflection for the Democrat Party that a majority of Americans looked at Trump, looked at the alternative and thought that the racist bigot who had boasted about sexually abusing women was the better option.
All the time the Russians could be blamed they could legitimately say that the only reason such an awful and flawed human being as Trump was in the top job was because of outside help, now that justification has gone it looks as though Americans just saw past the lies and bluster and plain weirdness and chose him.
Now that he is no longer hamstrung by the Mueller report, his lies will be bigger and his actions more eccentric and i say go at it Mr Trump, keep up the job of making your country a laughing stock great again.

Thursday, 28 March 2019

The Growing Threat From Ai

Anyone who has seen enough science fiction shows know that in the near future Artificial Intelligence and super intelligent machines will surpass human-level intelligence and either enslave or just flat out exterminate us all.
It all began with AI winning at chess and then has steadily progressed until we are reaching a point where AI could take our place on the evolutionary ladder and dominate us the way we now dominate all living things on Earth apes according to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Concerns about super intelligence is becoming a common theme with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s donating $1.6m and Tesla founder Elon Musk donated $10m to organisations concerned with existential threats of AI breaking out and becoming less than friendly to us, its creators.
With an interconnected World, the intelligence wouldn't need a physical body to do its work, a human hacker with an internet connection can cause havoc so imagine what a super intelligent computer can do if it wanted to do maximum damage.
The simplest way to keep AI from taking over is to introduce an 'off button' but that was tried in 2013 when programmers designed an AI that could teach itself to play Nintendo games and turn itself off when it lost but when it was losing the AI would just pause the game and keep it frozen so it would never lose.
Our saving grace at the moment is that humans write the code that run the Artificial intelligence but as the code gets evermore complex, are leaving the AI to write its own code, something called an AI Box which far from being in the realms of a sci-fi movie, are being used today.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk includes Artificial Intelligence in their list of concerns although there worries are that we will develop sophisticated cyber-weapons and arming autonomous robots but even we wouldn't be stupid enough to weaponise autonomous robots. Would we?

Aliens Watching Over Us

You can't expect to get a group of space scientists together for very long without the Fermi Paradox rearing its head and that was that question which the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) group pondered on, Why hasn't Earth received any messages from extraterrestrials yet?
One possibility explored was what they called 'the zoo hypothesis which is that we are already under observation by 'galactic zookeepers' who conceal themselves from human detection.
'That Earth would be the lone planet to evolve and host intelligent life among potentially billions of planets in our galaxy alone seems very unlikely. But if there are intelligent extraterrestrials out there, where are they, and why haven't we found them yet' said Florence Raulin-Cerceau, an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
One explanation put forward is that aliens are aware of Earth and are observing us as we would observe animals kept in a zoo although there was another explanation that humanity has been evaluated by alien civilisations, and 'quarantined' from our galactic neighbours for our own good and to avoid conflict being as we can be a bit violent towards any newcomers.
The zoo hypothesis throws in the theory that aliens generally avoid making their presence known to humanity, or avoid exerting an influence on development, preferring to observe us using equipment located on Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System and on occasion throw us a curve-ball such as an earthquake or warming climate to see how we cope and evolve.
Maybe if they do show themselves we may finally get an answer as to why they come all this way just to mutilate our livestock and anally probe drunk American rednecks? 

May Going But What Follows Will Be As Bad

How bad do you have to be to agree to resign in order to get your colleagues to agree with you? As bad as Theresa May as it turns out and let there be no bones about it, she has been bad.
The problem is that although we may be soon be shot of Theresa, there is an equally terrible Conservative waiting to take her place including the current favourite Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson all swimming in the very shallow
pool they will draw from.
Amidst screams of 'Sweet Jesus and all the little children, we are so screwed' we have to remember that the worst Prime Minister in living memory may not get her deal through so she will be hanging around for a while yet.
To be fair to Mrs May it wasn't just her that has been terrible, the entire Conservatives Government has been painfully awful since they got in power and drove through some of the most ideological right wing awfulness in living memory.
Considering that she took power from David Cameron promising 'to fight against burning injustices', her actions never matched her fine words with more austerity making people poorer, child poverty increasing, homelessness, disability cuts, NHS, Police and most Government Departments on their knees, the universal credit debacle, the increase of food banks and tax cuts for the higher earners.
She leaves with the UK perilously close to economic suicide and closer to breaking apart than it has ever been and the stench of the hostile environment for non-Brits polluting the air but when she finally goes we will be ruled over by yet another atrocious right wing zealot and the vicious, nasty Tory circle will begin to turn again.

Wednesday, 27 March 2019

Remembering The Pro-Brexit Quotes

Brexit should have meant Brexit apparently but before the whole thing descended into a farce, some people actually thought that Britain leaving the EU was going to be easy and straight forward so let's look back at what some of the Pro-Brexit MPs told us at the time of the referendum, before we found out it has been anything by easy.

'Coming to a free trade agreement with the EU should be one of the easiest in human history' Liam Fox
'Brexit was a war. We won' Arron Banks
'It was me that got us into this mess, I will get us out of it' Theresa May
'The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want' Michael Gove
'Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy' John Redwood
'We’ll get a great result out of Brexit. We’ll also unite the country' Dominic Raab
'I will vote Leave because I want a better deal for the people of this country, to save them money and to take control' Boris Johnson
'It is like threading the eye of a needle. If you have a good eye and a steady hand, it is easy enough,' David Davis
'If we Vote Leave we will be able to stop handing over so much money to the EU and be able to spend our money on priorities here in the UK' Gisela Stuart
'Without our EU budget contributions, we could give everyone a 60 per cent council tax cut'. Daniel Hannan
'If we vote to leave then I think the union will be stronger' Michael Gove
'Within 2 years, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU' David Davis
'I believe that we can get a free trade and customs agreement concluded before March 2019' David Davis
'The Conservative party will ensure that we fulfil our duty so that we can, as one country go forward together' Theresa May
'Trade relations with the EU could be sorted out in 'an afternoon over a cup of coffee' Gerard Batten'It will be easy to negotiate a trade deal' Paul Nutall
'I am confident that Theresa May and her team can deliver an arrangement that suits both the UK and the EU' Iain Duncan Smith

While hindsight may be great, throwing back the cringe worthy and embarrassingly incorrect quotes at the people who talked the country into Brexit is even better.