US to access UK ID details?
The USA has asked that any UK ID card be compatible with its own chip readers, to avoid spending money on a “VHS and Betamax” situation. Sound reasonable? Well, remember that this would probably also involve the US having access to the personal data behind that ID, reports The Register. I’m not happy about the amount of data the UK government wants to keep on its national ID database (far more than is needed just for identification), and the idea of the USA having access, too, is simply frightening – especially in light of its current human rights record in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. A nation so willing to use torture, intimidation and humiliation on anyone who isn’t both a US citizen and “the right sort” hasn’t got the moral right to demand access to personal data on non-US citizens.
pax et bonum
Track with co.mments
Track with del.icio.usBack after a holiday
We spent the bank-holiday long weekend up at my parents’ house on the Wirral. It’s the first time we’ve driven up there for a while, because cramming two children (3 and 1), wife and luggage into the car for a 4-5 hour journey isn’t always fun! However, the children are a bit older now and the journey was good (especially while they were asleep 
). We also spent some time with my brother Alan, his wife Lindsay and their son Archie, because they were coincidentally over for the evening on Saturday for a friend’s party. Catching up is always nice.
As well as the usual family things (Adam especially enjoyed spending Monday morning helping his grandpa in the garden, carrying bricks and logs, ferrying things from the front to the back of the house and so on), I was helping my dad sort out his “Mission Control” style computer setup – at the moment, he has 3 computers in his office, with a laptop in another room and several carcases lying around. You’d think from this that he’s pretty PC-savvy, and he is, but he is a Windows person and needed help setting up the linux box I’ve persuaded him to use as the gateway to the internet. Sorting that out wasn’t too bad, not even getting the tape archive system sorted. However, I was amazed to find him being taken in by a simple messenger spam. He’d thought that his Windows machine was broken because he kept getting messages about his Registry being corrupted, and that he should go and download this program to fix it. The warning bells, of course, are sounded by the “go and buy this” part.
Of course, it wasn’t a real error message at all, simply a piece of Windows Messenger spam – and finding this out stopped him spending US$40 on this pointless piece of software. Downloading a simple 22 kB piece of software stopped him ever having this problem again simply by turning off the completely pointless Windows Messenger Service – nothing to do with the MSN instant messaging client, just a stupid way for people to send you spam. Any Windows users, please visit grc.com and download the same thing if you haven’t already. There are also some excellent tools there to check how vulnerable your PC is to hacking; if you’re not already running a firewall, download ZoneAlarm for free and get one of the best pieces of protection you can have online.
pax et bonum
ID fraud?
The Register has a good analysis of the UK government’s claims that ID cards would prevent £1.3 billion in ID fraud costs each year. Taking the government’s own figures and breaking them down into the basic categories of fraud related to ID theft, they reach a true possible saving of £35 million per year. Set against the known costs of an ID card scheme, that doesn’t sound like much, really.
pax et bonum
Murphy's law
Some examples of Murphy’s law from Gathering Grace, and a huge collection here. I especially like the Toddlers’ Laws.
Horror story - a double acrostic
Ancient blood-consumer Dracula entranced fair girls. His inclination? Jugular knavery! Lonely Mina naively opined: petulance quiets rapacious searchers. The undying vampire wavered – xanthous youths zealous zephyr yielded xenoglossic wailing! Vain ululation, till she reached quintessentially piercing overtones. Now, Minas larynx kindling jitters in his gorge, famous evil did cravenly bleed away.
National Be Nice to Nettles Week
Yes, it’s National Be Nice to Nettles Week. One use for them I can definitely recommend is nettle risotto.
Not on the Label
I’ve just finished reading Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence. A journalist working on the food section of the Guardian newspaper, this book is an account of the food industry – what really goes into our foods, the working conditions of the people who produce it and the economics of the systems that drive it. And it’s not comfortable reading. The supermarkets are destroying not only local agriculture but even the quality of our food itself, with their emphasis on appearance and keeping qualities over taste and nutrition. They drive growers to pay below legal wages to immigrant workers (the only people who will suffer the conditions and pay offered) in order to meet the demands the supermarkets make. I was staggered to learn that not only do supermarkets expect the farmer to pay for all the labelling of the food and feel free to change the sizes of order right up until delivery but that they even expect the supplier to fund all those “three for the price of two” offers that the supermarkets run. Worse even than that, they often expect their suppliers to pay for the supermarket’s marketing!
If you care anything for the food you eat, you should read this book. If you don’t care about the food you eat then you should really read this book! You’ll never look at a supermarket chicken in the same way again.
pax et bonum
Living generously
For those of us who want to take better care of our world and make less impact on the environment and our fellow human beings might find much useful advice at A Year of Living Generously. If you want to reduce the amount of cleaning chemicals you use, then perhaps some good cleaning cloths like these might help. The glass wipes make good computer screen wipes!
pax et bonum
Beetroot cake
In our organic vegetable box last week was a bag of beetroot. Fine, you might think – very tasty. However, Anne has a problem eating too much beetroot, so we wanted to find something else to do with them than just boil and eat with dinner. And, lo and behold, on River Nene’s own website was this recipe for beetroot cake. Sounds strange? Well, after a moment’s thought, I guess it’s no stranger than carrot cake and we’re all used to that one now.
So, Anne baked a beetroot cake (gluten-free, of course!) and it was rather nice. For my personal taste, it could have used a little more spice (cinnamon, perhaps) to blend the flavours a bit better, but was was jolly nice, and a good alternative way to eat root vegetables!
pax et bonum
Real nappies or disposables?
The BBC are reporting a study done by the UK Environment Agency comparing the use of real nappies and disposables. Remarkably, the life-cycle analysis of environmental costs has come to the conclusion that there is little or no difference between them. At least, that is the headline. If you look deeper, there are several severe problems with both the study and the reporting.
- The study is based on 2000 interviews, but only 32 of these were the “real nappy” sample. This means that the study is statistically flawed by the use of such a small sample.
- The study assumes pretty much the worst-case use of real nappies – soaking dirty nappies in chemicals, washing small batches at high temperatures, tumble drying, and working out life-cycle costs over a single child’s time in nappies. However, many people don’t soak nappies (it doesn’t achieve much in our experience), wash fairly large batches (so fewer washes are needed, which means less energy) and hang their nappies on the line to dry (tumble driers are about the most energy-wasteful appliances there are). Even more than this, though, is the assumption that the production and disposal costs of the nappies apply only to a single child. If nappies are used on subsequent children (as they often are) and are passed on to other parents afterwards (which is common) or simply used as household cloths (which is also common), their costs must be spread out over these other uses, drastically reducing their environmental impact.
- The study is being reported as saying “they’re no different, so I bet you feel stupid for advocating real nappies?” However, even if the report was correct in that most people are no better off environmentally using real nappies, surely the correct approach is instead to say “don’t soak nappies in bleach, wash at 60°C, don’t tumble dry and reuse them after your child’s potty trained”?
- A more practical aspect is lost, however, in this study, which is simply that it costs much less money to use real nappies than disposables! The initial outlay is higher (perhaps £200 for a full set of nappies and wraps over the child’s time in nappies) but ongoing costs are far lower (just detergent and electricity for washing). By contrast, a child in disposables will easily cost £10 per week; over 2 years (generously), that’s £1000, and I’ve heard even higher estimates for the costs. That’s a significant saving, even if the environmental impacts were the same.
The take-home message, it seems to me, is never to take such things at face value. Indeed, this study seems so out of step with reality that I have to wonder whether it really was as “independent” as it’s meant to be. Or it could just be incompetent – I doubt that it would pass peer review for publication in a reputable journal, especially in view of the small sample size.
Update
OK, I’ve had a chance for a brief glance through the report, and some of my original criticisms above were off base – I blame the BBC for poor reporting However, there are some even more extraordinary claims in the report than I’d thought.
The study doesn’t assume that all real nappies will be tumble dried, but does make the strange assumption that half of real nappy users will dispose of poo in the household waste, rather than flushing it down the toilet! They make this assumption based on the finding that half of real nappy users use non-flushable liners – but given the liner will have to be separated from the nappy anyway, do many people really throw it in the bin? But, then, I was amazed to find that most people using disposable nappies happily throw the entire contents of the nappy in the nappy bin – even though it’s illegal to dispose of human faecal matter in household rubbish!
Even stranger, apparently a tenth of real-nappy users iron their nappies, which (apart from its environmental impact) is surely just masochism 
But reading the report just confirms the tiny sample they’ve used – one crucial conclusion is based on just 2 respondents. In any case, the take-home message is still to use real nappies and to do so in a manner that keeps their impact as low as possible – not tumble drying, reusing nappies for several children, keeping detergent use and electricity costs down.
pax et bonum
My worldview
I’m not sure I agree with their description of “Postmodernist” – “There is no absolute truth for you” is rather strong But perhaps that’s just because I’m also quite “culturally creative”...
You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.
63% Postmodernist
56% Cultural Creative
38% Idealist
25% Romanticist
25% Existentialist
25% Modernist
19% Materialist
6% Fundamentalist
What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com
Good on'yer, George!
George Galloway (recently elected to the UK parliament for the anti-Iraq-war party Respect) has ben raging against US senators and officials in hearings in the USA about their allegation that he personally profited from oil from Saddam Hussein. And he’s been laying into them about his own record on Iraq, their lack of evidence against him and their own dirty hands after the US invasion. It’s good to hear some plain speaking
Update
A couple of other reports of this confrontation (from the Guardian newspaper) also make amusing reading.
I particularly loved the description of Galloway’s style in the second of those articles as “a feat of bare-knuckled rhetoric not often witnessed by the senators, who are accustomed to considerably more reverence for their positions”. Of course, this is the problem with slandering members of a different country’s Parliament – they’re hardly likely to be cowed by US senators! Perhaps they should have paid just a little attention to the way politics is played over here before expecting humble acquiescence The article ends by saying of the senators, “They had come equipped for a trial and found themselves in the role of stooges for a man accustomed to playing to the gallery.” Which pretty much says it all.
pax et bonum
Impossible things
An excellent and moving story from Jen Lemen.
I'm back!
Apologies to anyone disappointed by the lack of entries in the past week or so. It’s been a busy time for work, largely because of the course I was leading earlier this week. Having had to spend a day in London is never my favourite thing, but I do enjoy leading courses! This one was a one-day Professional Development Day on Medical editing, organised by the Society of Freelance Editors and Proofreaders, during which I was leading two of the four sessions – the ones dealing with the science content (basic genetics, gene nomenclature, molecular biology techniques, chemical nopmenclature, measurement and statistics). Over the past two or three weeks, I’ve written over 15 000 words, plus abstracting that material for the handouts, plus slides to accompany the presentation. So, as you can imagine, I’ve not had too much time left for blogging! Fortunately, the course went well, judging by the favourable comments.
The other thing inhibiting any blogging is that I have been involved in a debate on another blog that about whether God causes disasters, which means we’ve been talking about God’s sovereignty and the nature of the Incarnation. After abusing the host’s comment space for a while, I decided that I should use my own space to post about this with less worry :) However, with everything else that’s been going on, I’ve not had time to write that post, which has meant that I didn’t feel I could write anything else, either :(
Anyhow, that post should be coming up shortly, and normal service should be resumed thereafter.
pax et bonum
Obligatory election post
So, we’ve got a Labour government again – Tony Blair has a third term as Prime Minister (a first for a Labour PM). But their majority is hugely cut from over 160 to less than 70. This is, I suppose, pretty much the best we could hope for. Blair’s majority has been cut to the point he’ll have trouble passing contentious legislation; if he had trouble with ID cards with a 160 majority, he’ll not find it any easier with a 70 majority! I was rather sad that the LibDems only made a 11 seat gain (current prediction). Better for everyone if they had done even better, although 11 seats is nothing to be sneezed at when it represents an increase of about 20%. And, one again, this election shows the problem with our first-past-the-post system – Labour polled 37% of the vote, the Conservatives 33% and the LibDems 23%, but their numbers of seats are 353,194 and 59 as I write.
Locally, my MP is still Andrew Lansley, increasing his vote by 0.8% (!) – watch this space for more on immigration after his recent letter! Labour slipped by nearly 5%, and everyone else benefitted (especially the LibDems, up 2.9%, now very clearly the second-place party in front of Labour). In Cambridge city, Anne Campbell (Lab) lost her seat to the LibDems on a 15% swing.
Let’s hope the new government governs well and with justice.
pax et bonum
Not hearing from my MP
Well, my MP said he was going to write but, sadly, no letter has arrived in time for it to do any good before the General Election. So, I guess we’ll just have to proceed on the assumption that Andrew Lansley (a Conservative cabinet member) really was confused about the difference between immigration and asylum – or didn’t think it important enough to clear up before the election. Which is sad, really.
Update
Well, it looks like I wrote a little too soon! The post was late and in it was a letter from Andrew Lansley! Sadly, though, it was rather pitiful.
I have always been clear about the distinction between immigration and asylum.
That’s it. That is how he explains his understanding of these issues. Oh, he does add that they are “important issues, because both have been so chaotically managed by Labour”, but that is neither an answer to the questions I asked him nor what the Conservative election message has been. It’s rather sad that he took the time to answer a letter but didn’t take the time to answer the questions in that letter, rendering the exercise rather pointless.
Anyhow – get out and vote, all you Brits!
pax et bonum
Busy, busy
Real Life^TM^ has been busy lately. Mostly because I’ve been writing a course for the Society of Freelance Editors and Proofreaders on Medical Editing; they’ve organised a one-day ‘Professional development’ conference and I’m giving two of the four sessions (the ones involving the science – genetics and gene nomenclature, molecular-biology techniques, chemical nomenclature, measurement, and statistics). This has involved quite a lot of writing – my manual comes to over 15,000 words, and the handouts total over 8500, plus slides. And meeting the deadline has meant less time for blogging (reading or writing). Sorry about that
However, that’s now past, thanks to the excellent OpenOffice suite, a full-featured word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet for £0. Yup, that’s right, it’s free gratis. And, even better, it’s also free libre – OpenOffice is Open Source software, so no vendor tie in! It’s got the usual features (including support for MS Office filetypes), plus one rather useful one – direct one-click PDF generation. For quickly producing copies to email out for comments, this is excellent. However, although the quality of the output is mostly perfect, bitmap images are downsampled by the inbuilt PDF generator so, for the final proofs, I produced the PDF using the KDE environment’s very neat built-in PDF generator, which is just another print queue. Yet another plus for KDE and GNU/Linux as a productive office desktop!
So, on Monday week (16th May), I’ll be giving the talks to 60 or so people, down in London. I’ll report back on how it went!
pax et bonum
Gardening
Well, that was quite a weekend! The weather has finally decided that it’s summer, so we were all in shorts yesterday. And we (well, Anne mostly) managed to get our peas and broad beans planted, finally. So, everything that has to be in the ground now is – chard (coming up!), fennel, potatoes, broad beans and peas. The tomato plants are doing well on the kitchen windowsill, and the peppers, cucumbers and courgettes are growing nicely in the outhouse, together with some bedding plants. The only thing we’re still waiting to come up are the butternut squashes. And, with any luck, we’ll get the sweetcorn planted in empty toilet roll tubes later today, ready for planting out in a month or so, after we’ve dug up the broccoli plants (picked the last of the crop last night ). All in all, we’re pretty pleased with the garden now. Quite a change from a couple of years ago, when we had totally abandoned the garden for various reasons (time, children, bad backs and so on). And it’s very nice to have it as a place that is being used, worked in and loved, and it’s even nicer to watch things growing that we’ve planted, and that we’ll get to eat in a couple of months!
Kinesis has a good post today about the link between our food and the politics of justice. Growing our own food, buying from Farmers’ Markets , buying organic or free-range meat and buying fairly traded goods all help us to live out a belief that we should not exploit others and that our food should be good food, not intensively produced, badly prepared, wastefully packaged rubbish whose sale is governed only by profit rather than the welfare of the environment, the farmer and the consumer.
pax et bonum
