Ideologically blind

I've just been listening to the "Today" program on radio 4.

And today there was a section on education and school admission policy, which isn't what I want to comment about.

No, I was irritated by a comment from a representative of the Barnados charity, which complained that the difference between the academic achievement of the rich and the poor hadn't shrunk. And by implication that was a bad thing the government could fix.

Now, I don't know about you, but I can see a very simple reason why this might be the case - which just didn't seem to occur to the representative.

Intelligence is an inheritable trait - and intelligence can be linked to both educational achievement and income.

True, the link is far from perfect. It's an indication only. But we should not be terribly surprised if the children of the "winners" of the last generation "win" this one as well.

We should be taking advantage. Look, look , study the sciences. Understand the universe. Learn how we can manipulate reality at the level of the atom. Build server farms.

Because science and technology are directly responsible for the industrial revolution, the computer revolution and now the biological revolution.

Each such revolution has benefited the society as a whole, eventually.

Trying to push back the tide - sorry, ignore reality for an ideology that says everyone is equal and that it's the systems fault that they haven't achieved...

Hasn't.

Midwives...

Morning all

For your daily dose of insanity, have a look here...

It would appear that the medical establishment has published a report that says that a home birth has three times the risk of the baby dying.

It came complete in the lancet with an editorial, which is quoted in the guardian as including the line... ""women have the right to choose how and where to give birth, but they do not have the right to put their baby at risk"."

Now, I'm going to go as far as assuming that no one in the article has lied or is materially wrong in what they say. Which, for me, is rather generous.

The response from someone who could be described as the head of a midwife trades union was...

She said midwives now "feel there is a concerted and calculated global attack and backlash against home birth which is being unfairly pilloried by some sectors of the global medical maternity establishment.

"There is a danger that risk during childbirth is presented in a way which is leading women to believe that hospital birth equals a safe birth. It does not. There is no hard and fast guarantee that a woman will have a safer birth in a hospital than at home".

She's wrong. And for a couple of reasons. Let us list them?

1) They aren't comparing the same thing. The medical journal reported on infant death; she's talking about maternal death.

2) "Global" is not a dirty word. The "Global medical establishment" has eradicated smallpox. What she's saying is that "One of the most educated professions in the world disagrees with me"

3) "attack and backlash" Hmmm. Either it's an attack on "home births" or it's a backlash against something midwives are doing. You can't have an attack and backlash at the same time. They describe different things.

4) That last paragraph is a little confusing. If I was to paraphrase the entire thing, what would it say? "There is a chance women could be misinformed about risk". Ok, fair enough. Which is why studies like this are important, because slightly flawed though it probably is, it remains better then no evidence.

She just doesn't like it.

5) Comparing cars to tractors. I haven't had anything to do with maternity hospitals, home births or the risks of child birth. However, I do know a few things.

One of the critical things is that doctors will strongly advise anyone who hasn't had a perfectly ordinary pregnancy to give birth in a hospital. Be it high blood pressure, diabetes or infection by zombie bite - they all advise a hospital is safer.

This forms a self selecting group, those at home who are low risk, those in the hospital at higher (average) risk.

And yet, despite all this, three times as many babies survived in hospital.

Which sounds safer to you?

Left speechless

As you're all aware, I'm not a great fan of certain groups of people. I believe in equality, rather then feminism for example.

Which leads me to this...quoted from the Guardian due to the pay wall at the Times.

The coalition government's emergency budget could be branded unlawful after a groundbreaking legal case was launched in the high court. Papers filed on Friday claim that Treasury officials broke the law by failing to carry out an assessment of whether the plans for heavy spending cuts would hit women hardest.

.....

"There is a point of principle here. The question is – had the government followed the proper process, would parliament have voted for the budget? If they had known that 72% of the cuts would be borne by women, would they have voted for the budget?"

I'd strongly urge you to read the whole article, but the gist is contained above.

So, the accusation is two fold, that the government failed to check to see that the budget was gender neutral and that it will primarily affect women.

The first thing is a sign of the problem - that the last government changed the law to require an assessment on the effect of changes in policy on groups such as women and the disabled. Sound like a massive bureaucratic waste of time that could be scrapped in a heart beat? This is the sort of thing that is costing a fortune. "Oh no, we've made a decision! Lets quickly check it doesn't disadvantage HALF THE POPULATION".

Secondly, they say that the cuts will primarily effect women. Now, given the Fawcett society didn't say that the cuts were targeted against women, they aren't. They'd be screaming from the roofs if this was the case.

But if you remember the budget, one of the points was increasing the rate that retirement age would increase to 66.

Critically, women currently retire at 60, rather then 65. So the biggest gender specific measure was to cut five years of paying a pension to women while their male counterpart worked.

Isn't equality such a terrible thing?

----

And a side note, since they've never complained about the budget before, does that mean all the rest were either neutral or pro-women?

We have notohing to do with the animal kingdom

This morning, in the 10 minutes I was listening to the news on my way to work yesterday it managed to annoy me.

There was an article on a new study which reportedly showed that a mother who goes to work when their children are very young doesn't do any damage to them.

Now, this isn't what inspired the anger. They had a representative from some organisation whose name escapes me. Dedicated to helping mothers to stay at home with their children.

What sparked off my rage was their first comment on "How in the animal kingdom animals looked after their young...".

I wanted to take her and turn her in a circle, pointing to the world around her.

The rate of infant/maternal mortality. Childhood diseases now rendered so rare they make the national news on occasion.

Yes, in the animal kingdom mothers have to hunt for their children. Pull down and slaughter prey that fights back or find other food, edible foliage and the like.

She has to go to tescos.

THERE IS NO COMPARISON!

New toys...

We all like new toys - and telling the world we have them.

And I've got a new toy!

I'm fairly sure I've ranted about my netbook on here once or twice - I love the thing to bits, after all. But, well, it's not perfect.

And the one thing that bugs me is battery life. I can use it for between 1-2 hours. An hour playing warcraft or two hours with notepad, tea and some serious thinking.

(I know,doesn't happen often lately)

But if you use it for half an hour, while eating lunch at work...maybe use it later in the kitchen, listening to the radio while you cook. That leaves you at 50% or less.

Then you've got to start making choices - because deep discharging (aka, running till flat) is very bad for lithium rechargeable batteries.

So do you use it for another half an hour, push it to 25%? But what if you need it in a hurry for something else afterwards... shouldn't you be recharging it?

However, this problem is now solved.

For I've gone and spent money (painful though it was) for a new battery. It's not the same size, nor twice or thrice as big. It's 3.4 times as big. So a naive assessment says it should last 3.4 hours to 6.8. This sounds like an improvement!

But no, better yet - because it's new and not started to degrade it hasn't suffered the fate of the old one yet. The old one could store only 80% of a full charge due to age.

So that's really 4.25-8.5 hours. Getting better...

And still further - because it has more cells (9 vs 3) the drain on each cell is reduced by a third. So there is less energy lost at that stage as well. I can't quantify this (to do so would require a really sensitive thermometer and a sealed, controlled environment) - but it's one more reason the new battery is just...

...well...


...shiny....

Oh dear...

Morning all.

I was going to rip apart an article on pornography today. Mostly because I was reading the website and thought I'd fallen into the twilight zone.

However, I'm not.

Because I never want to talk about something on here that I wouldn't explain to a child.

So if you want a look, go here - but be warned, the author may not have a good relationship with reality. I certainly couldn't relate to any part...

Radiation!

Grrrr.

I often find myself telling the radio that it's wrong. And today was a case in point.

There was a "not-in-my-back-yard" environmentalist complaining about plans to store nuclear waste. You see, he's wrong. badly wrong. We shouldn't be trying to get rid of it. We should be getting more.

There are two ways to deal with very highly radioactive waste - we're talking fuel rods and the like. The easy one is store it. You find somewhere quiet and isolated (say, Scotland? In a Welsh mountain?) and store it for the next age or two. This does work, yes. You build a big enough facility and tell countries who want to get rid of the stuff "Pay us xxx, deliver it safely to [point] and we'll take it off your hands".

Charge enough and you cover costs - so a good approach to start with. It's stored in a high tech country away from nasty terrorists and freedom fighters and the like. (And no, I don't count the Scottish as freedom fighters. Other words spring to mind.)

But the other one is better - that is, after having acquired as much of the worlds really radioactive waste as we can, we change the plan.

We build a new reactor and use the damned stuff as fuel. It's so dangerous and radioactive BECAUSE IT CONTAINS ENERGY. You set up an environment where the neutrons it emits are recaptured by other material - this causes more fission and more and more. This generates more radiation for a short time - along with shed loads of heat.

End product - low carbon energy and your high level waste is suddenly not so dangerous.

Get rid of it? Buy it!