American Dream
This series on BBC 2 has been fascinating.
One particular interview was with a black American fighter pilot, who after being shot down over Germany was sent to Colditz.
Complexity is Fraud
PJ O’Rourke is another favourite author of mine. He said the title of this post and it is a nice simple quote on Radio 5, this afternoon, whilst discussing his new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards
You could argue that the quote is the corollary of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one.
He also said this about the American healthcare system, “When I go in for my tennis elbow, I’m paying for someone else’s gunshot wound.”
Matt Ridley on Shale Gas
Matt Ridley is one of my favourite authors. I first read his book,Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
He has written an article for the Times today about extracting gas from shale rock and how it could solve the energy gap.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs.
Whether Mr Huhne likes it or not, a dash for gas is coming. What’s more, it is almost all good news. The discovery of how to exploit huge global reserves of gas encased in shale rock is causing epochal change in the energy scene. Shale gas is like any other gas except that it is everywhere: from Poland to Pennsylvania, from Queensland to Sichuan. There is even some in the Wirral and the Weald, but don’t hold your breath that the Nimbys will let much of it be tapped.
America, where the shale gas revolution began, has 50 years, probably more, of increasingly cheap supplies. The US is not just turning away liquefied-natural-gas tankers from Qatar (hence the current low price of gas), but considering turning gas-import terminals over to exports. Shale gas is popular with those who do not like being dependent on Putins and Ahmadinejads, so unpopular with those two martinets.
I’ll add my thoughts to his on the various ways of generating electricity or heat.
- Coal – Dirty, polluting and kills those that mine it, either directly or slowly with nasty lung diseases.
- Nuclear – Clean, but unloved by the greens and many of the general public.
- Wind – Loved by the greens, but unsightly, very inefficient and needs to have some form of backup generation.
- Solar – Alright in the Sahara, but problematic elsewhere.
- Oil – Works, but too valuable for other purposes to burn.
- Tidal – Expensive and unpopular.
- Gas – Clean, less than half the CO2 of coal and doesn’t need unsightly overhead lines, as you can distribute the gas by hidden pipes.
So as Ridley says gas from shale has a lot going for it.
I agree for now! But who’s to say something even better won’t come along in a couple of years. Never underestimate the ingenuity of the human mind and the politician’s ability to always look up the backside of a gift horse, rather than check the important parts, like the legs, heart, lungs and temperament.
The Masons Arms
This pub in Devonshire Street played a major part in my life in the 1970s.
The Masons Arms
It was just round the corner from the offices of Time Sharing Ltd., the company we were all associated with in the early 1970s, so often if you needed anyone they were drinking in the Masons, as it was always called. One of our staff, who later joined Metier, even developed a long-term relationship with the landlord, which still flourishes today.
But it’s not just me, that has pleasant memories of the pub One of my friends, who sadly died a few years ago, had a part-time job in the pub, whilst he worked for AEI. He claimed that someone from AEI New Zealand, the landlord of the Mason’s and himself, enjoyed themselves immensely on a spree in London. Now this was after AEI had been taken over by GEC and all expenses had to be approved by Arnold Weinstock‘s office. It was queried by asking who they had taken out for the evening. The reply was that it was the New Zealand High Commissioner. And to prove it he gave the office, the personal telephone number of the Commissioner. The expenses were paid.
Business is very different these days, but I’ll always remember the Masons Arms with fondness.
Elect Your Local Councillor by Lot
This was an the heading of an article in The Times yesterday, by Vernon Bogdanor.
He makes a convincing case, giving examples from fifth-century Athens and present day, British Columbia.
This is the last two paragraphs.
Oscar Wilde once said that the prime defect of socialism was that it took up too many evenings, but the experiment in British Columbia shows that it is perfectly feasible to extend participation in a modern democracy, and such participation need not be the exclusive province of the better-off and the better-educated.
Like most other democracies, we in Britain have hardly begun to harness the potential of the ordinary citizen. What better place to begin than with local government, the Cinderella of our political institutions?
I think his ideas are worth pusuing.
Something More Terminal
One of my computers suffered a terminal failure over the weekend, and I needed to take it to the menders yesterday. The symptoms were that it refused to even start, recycling round the login endlessly, but never getting near starting.
Before this a scan by Clamwin had shown that the computer was infected by the DroopTroop virus. There were several instances in a sub-directory where I had downloaded an old blog and Clamwin also flagged that winlogon.exe and Internet Explorer had been replaced by versions that had been modified by the trojan. The first explained why the computer wouldn’t start and the second, why Internet Explorer didn’t search properly and pointed me at a load of porn and shopping sites, I didn’t want.
The machine was completely unuseable.
So what caused it. Either the downloaded blog contained the data, so did someone find a way of commenting on the blog and adding the virus in that way?
But the machine had also been used by my late son to download all sorts of computer games from various sites. I would have thought that he would have been more sensible than to introduce a virus.
The computer has never been used for e-mail, so I doubt that route was possible.
On the other hand, the computer has been showing odd behaviour for months and I called the menders in to fix it. We thought that somehow McAffee was corrupted and this was causing the computer to stop. It looks like the virus was there then. I removed McAffee and replaced it with Clamwin. Another fault was that the computer wouldn’t run Windows Media Player. It just said it was an illegal win32 application.
This is a list of Drooptroop symptons from the PCThreat web site.
Modified browser homepage settings and search results
Hijacked Windows desktop wallpaper and strange desktop shortcuts and icons
Abnormal Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Drooptroop.cpt files in Windows task manager system processes, tower speaker error bleeping sound
Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Drooptroop.cpt reactivates itself after been deleted manually, extremely difficult to get rid of
Legal registry keys, dlls and system files missing, causing “Blue Screen Of Death” error
Abnormal bandwidth use, slow Internet browser and Windows system
Pop-up blocker unable to block annoying porn and gambling related bulk pop-upsWhat Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Drooptroop.cpt will do when embedded within a computer is as follows:
Records browsing habits, monitors Windows system activity to generates equivalent pop-ups
Bypasses security tools and forwards credit card, usernames, passwords and other private information to outside hackers
Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Drooptroop.cpt downloads and installs diverse malicious programs via Windows and browser security loopholesTrojan-Dropper.Win32.Drooptroop.cpt has also been seen to display the following behavior:
Adds a Registry Key (RUN) to auto start Programs on system start up
Registers a Dynamic Link Library File
Executes a Process
This Process Deletes Other Processes from Disk
So you can see it is an evil thing to get on your computer to say the least. Luckily, I only used this computer for developing Visual Basic programs and the odd bit of browsing of news and other respected web sites.
I suppose that I could have inadvertently installed something nasty in the last few months, becausev of my awful typing. But I hope not!
Moving Phones
Obviously, as I’m moving, I will have to change my phone. Here I’m on BT, but in London, I’ll be using cable for broadband and TV, so it would seem logical to use that for phones as well.
I hadn’t realised that I will be able to move my number, but I can. So I won’t have to tell a lot of my contacts, what my new number is! It will be a great time saver.
Gluten-Free Television
I don’t ever take my television with adverts, unless I actually really want to watch the program. So of the major programs on ITV like X-Factor, Downton Abbey and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, I’ve not seen a single episode.
Today my son came up the M11 and he was watching a channel showing endless repeats of Frazier, which is a series of which I’ve never watched a single minute. Nearly all of the adverts were for products that I couldn’t eat, except for one for the Halifax Bank, for which I have no need.
I actually wonder whether these adverts have any positive effect for the companies involved as many households would actually be turned off by them. There was one advert for Iceland, that really convinced never to go near the shop, if all their customers were like those shown.
Would You Like to be Rescued by a Chihuahua?
This seems to be a story that someone made up about a chihuahua being trained to be a police dog. But on reading it on the BBC, it appears that because of its size it can squeeze through small holes to find people trapped by earthquakes.
The only time I’ve seen small working dogs before, was in an airport in the United States, where the Beagle Brigade were sniffing passengers for illegal food imports.
The Anonymous Widower 