End of a decade – part 2

[For people inclined to argue we aren’t about to enter a new decade, please see part one.  Thank you.]
On a personal level, this past decade hasn’t been that great.  At the start of it, I was well-supplied with older relatives – I had one great-grandparent, one grandparent, and both parents.  At the close of it, [...]

Two recommendations

Yes, I’m still alive.  Whoo-hoo/ Ah crap*
[* - delete as applicable]
I have encountered two things on the web that I thought might interest you.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

Reviewing a biography of Beaumarchais, David A Bell, dean of the humanities faculty at Johns Hopkins University, has the following to say:

Beaumarchais was a manic character, of the sort who would now be diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder or something similar, and placed on medication designed to ensure a long [...]

Did you know this about the postal strike?

Because I didn’t.
In all the talk about the postal strikes, we’ve been hearing a lot that the Royal Mail is dying.  No-one sends letters anymore, we’re told, they use email instead.  It’s a persuasive argument, because it seems intuitively correct – I send quite a few emails, and I almost never write a letter.  But [...]

How low can you stoop?

As you may have heard, Jan Moir, a columnist for the Daily Mail, wrote a vile, hate-filled column ladling serves-him-right spite all over the (at the time) unburied coffin of Stephen Gately.  I was going to do a take-down of the column itself, but many, many people have beaten me to the punch, so there [...]

David Cameron + Incapacity Benefit + Basic Arithmetic = FAIL

David Cameron has announced that he wants to reassess every person on Incapacity Benefit to see if they are fit for work within three years of a Conservative election victory.  Let’s do some maths.  (No, wait, come back!)

The right to die

This is a re-posting of a comment I left a little while ago over at Mental Nurse.  The post I was commenting on was discussing the sad case of Kerrie Wooltorton, a woman who had made use of a so-called ‘living will’ to ask doctors not to save her life following a suicide attempt.

It’s The Sun Wot Won’t Win It

The Sun, as you probably know, has announced that it no longer supports Labour, and has switched its allegiance to the Conservative party (except in Scotland where it ‘remains to be convinced’).  This will, predictably, trigger much Conservative joy and much Labour despair, but it doesn’t actually matter, despite what Andrew Neill (the ex-Murdoch apparatchik) [...]

Twitter: On the one hand ‘meh’, on the other ‘yay!’

This is a post I started a while ago, and then scratched away at half-heartedly for a bit, and then gave up on.  I’ve been inspired to come back to it and finish it by this post on a recent blog discovery, Kapitano.  (Well, I say ‘discovery’, but given that he commented here, it’s not [...]

Mice overcome first law of thermodynamics

(But surely that shouldn’t be a struggle for such hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings…)
The first law of thermodynamics holds that

energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely changed from one form to another.

This is one of the most basic principles (so far as we know) of the physical universe.  It’s why we can’t have a perpetual motion machine.  [...]