Very late flowers

There are usually a few flowers in the garden, even in midwinter, but this is the first time I've seen antirrhinums flowering in December. A plant in my front garden has been flowering at full power for months.

Late Harvest

Yesterday I gathered half a dozen tomatoes from plants still surviving in my greenhouse. I'm also still eating homegrown apples, Ellison's Orange and Lord Lambourne dessert apples and Bramley cooking apples.

The Mental Powers of the Powerful

I just watched a House of Commons Committee questioning representatives of 'payday lenders'.

Confronted by the information that 3% of a set of 1.25 million borrowers had difficulty repaying, one MP decided to calculate how many people were involved.

His first attempt was 3% of 1.25 million = 125 000

He then resorted to a calculator, and after taking rather longer than I'd have expected, opted for 'about 40 000', which is I suppose near enough, but what a lot of fuss about a very easy calculation !!

Negative Royalties

As I struggled with the 'child proof' top on a bottle of cough medicine, I reflected that some disagreeable person, or antisocial company, holding the copyright or patent, may receive royalties to reward them for inconveniencing me.

I wish that inconvenient inventions could attract negative royalties, so that those who devise them could fined every time their pernicious invention is used.

Is Washing Up Liquid Necessary

I've noticed that if the washing up bowl gets greasy and discoloured, filling it with washing powder dissolved in hot water and leaving it to soak overnight restores it to a state of purity.

I'm tempted to use washing powder for my washing up, but I keep the washing powder in the garage near the washing machine, so it's never handy when I wash up.

Puzzled by units

A micro-meter is referred to as a 'micron' . Why isn't a nanometre called a 'nanon' ?

That thought was prompted by my converting Angstrom units into nanons. I've always found Angstrom units very counter intuitive and thought they were being phased out, but they still crop us quite frequently.


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A False Sense of Security

The head of MI5 has complained that Mr. Snowden's revelations about the activities of our and the American security agencies puts us all in danger.

I doubt that. I suspect that mutual spying by various national agencies has given each of them a good idea what the others are doing. Large criminal and terrorist organisations probably have agents in at least some national governments, so they too will have the information.

The only people kept in the dark were the ordinary citizens who pay for it all. Now we know.

All that has been damaged is the dignity of our spies.They should be thankful that they are no longer deluded into a false sense of security.

Marriage and Tax

There is to be a tax concession for some married couples. I think the government may be overreaching itself.

I doubt whether the relationship between two people need concern anyone but themselves. There are many possible relationship between people yet the government has singled out for approval relationships between just two people. Until recently the people had to be of opposite gender. That has been liberalised to any two people regardless of gender, but why just two? Groups of three or more people sometimes live together in happy partnerships.

When two people have children it is a matter of public concern that the parents co-operate to care for their children, though I'm not sure how responsible parenthood could be rewarded through the tax system, without penalising the children of uncaring parents, but where there are no children partnership arrangements should be by civil contract drawn up to suit the people concerned.

That leaves the question of inheritance; bequests to partners are exempt from inheritance tax. Inheritance tax has always seemed to me a particularly spiteful tax, so I should be happy for it to be abolished, but failing that everyone could be allowed to designate just one person whose inheritance from them would be tax free.

Caring, Sharing Incompetents

People repelled by what they have seen as the predatory recklessness of commercial banks have sometimes trusted their affairs to the Co-operative Bank.

That too is now in trouble, unable to pay the interest on its permanent interest bearing shares, so some elderly folk are likely to lose a substantial proportion of their income.

I've long been puzzled by the co-operative movement. Its shops are not supposed to make a profit, yet are markedly more expensive than their profiteering rivals. It appears that unimaginative self righteousness fares no better than reckless greed.

A Rhetorical use of Percentages.

I saw this headline on the BBC web site:

"A landmark report says scientists are 95% certain that humans are the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s">

How accurate is the 95 supposed to be? Was that number the result of a series of calculations. Might it just as well have been 94 or 96?

I believe that people decided they were fairly sure but not quite sure and decided that 95 was a suitable number to represent that degree of qualified confidence. That is sloppy thinking and undermines my confidence in the people concerned. Sir Karl Popper said the probability of any scientific hypothesis is zero. That too was rhetoric, but his zero is a stimulating challenge to the optimistic 95%.

Pricing Energy

It's been proposed that energy prices be frozen for a while.

That strikes me as perverse. We are trying to reduce consumption of energy to slow down global warming, so higher prices should be helpful.

People sometimes worry about the profits energy companies make. I see little to worry about. Retained profits will be invested in improving supply, and distributed profits will mostly go to pension funds, and help maintain aged folk who might otherwise need state support.

Little Used Cycle Lanes

During my bus journey into town today I noticed two people cycling on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, but didn't see anyone using the cycle lane next to that pavement.

I have occasionally seen cyclists using cycle lanes, but it's a rare sight.