A little thought experiment for you all

As you may have noticed, on occasion I complain about public figures in the UK. So lets try a little thought experiment, shall we?

Imagine a little boy - picture him in your mind.

He's about 3, blond, wearing one of those old fashioned white and blue sailor suits that you see every now and again.

Now beat him with a pool cue till he's unconscious.

It's not nice, is it? It's monstrous, wrong and something that should never happen.

Picture his cousin - same age, a sweet little girl who only wants a pony. Beaten with the same pool cue.

Both are equally objectionable. Both leave you feeling sick to the stomach, if you really try and imagine it.

But in recent days there's been news coverage about violence - lets quote a few of the usual suspects, with our little thought experiment in mind.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said violence against women and girls was "an obscenity".

Harriet Harman, minister for women and equality, said tackling violence against women and girls was "one of the government's top priorities".

She said the strategy called Together we can end violence against women and girl, focused on prevention, which was "critical" to long-term change.

"We have to work to change attitudes in order to eliminate violence against women and girls and to make it clear beyond doubt that any form of violence against women is unacceptable," she said.

It's quite clear here - they only care about their precious victims - if they fit the right profile. The right media image.

I believe we should stamp out violence - not against women and girls. Not women and children.

I believe we should stomp on violence.

Why discriminate?

Cold blooded

You know what it's like. You feeling ill, under the weather and debating if you should call in sick.

So you dig out a digital thermometer to check if you have a temperature or not.

And it turns out you do. It's 36.0 degrees.

You can't even get as far as the average 37 degrees required to be normal.

Let alone fevered.

The other day...

The other day there was a power cut at one of our sites. These things happen.

Still, I happened to be there at the time and while the power was out I needed to do things. So I happily bounced along the corridor to my destination, where I met a couple of secretaries.

They were saying it's too dark to go any further down this dark corridor, that they couldn't see and they wanted a torch.

What I wanted to say was "There's plenty of light. There's enough to see you're wearing slightly opaque seamed stockings, after all".

But that would get me fired, as HR have no sense of humour. So I just told them not to worry and to get on with it. At which point they seemed to go off in a huff.

Was that not what I was supposed to say?

What were they thinking?

What were they thinking - or were they not thinking at all?

Quoted from The Times,

Professor Nutt was sacked after criticisms he had made of the Government’s drugs policy were published in a paper by the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London. The comments were made in a lecture he delivered in July, in which he said that Ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes. He also criticised the decision to upgrade cannabis to class B.

So what we have here is a scientist giving a lecture where he gives an honest opinion to a group of people.

This is usually called teaching.

If those who listen agree with your points and find them reasonable, with good enough evidence to reference them in a work of their own this is usually considered a WIN condition by scientists.

They fired a scientist for being a scientist.

Muppets.

Fail.

Lets imagine, if you will, you are a giant computer software company.

You've got your own operating system and a messenger system. You would imagine that one would work on the other flawlessly.

One hundred percent of the time, perfect running. Provided that the internet is on and no security issues exist. Or - maybe not.

Allow me to introduce Microsoft Messenger. Despite being on a perfectly stable, boring Windows XP setup it refuses to connect to the internet. Which is on. Nothing running that would cause problems.

But if you reboot it *may* work.

If they can't get something as simple as a chat client to work reliably why do we trust them with an OS?