Monday, April 25, 2005

52 Weeks to Make the World a Better Place: Week 18 - Make your vote count

Keeping things topical, it's worth thinking about this as it's generally a five-year sentence. After yet another term of broken promises, Bush-worship and increasingly paranoid laws, you'd be forgiven for abstaining from the whole charade. We KNOW the Tories are even worse than Neo-Labour, yet there's little real ground between them. Given this fact, we can pretty much imagine how much overlap there is for a so-called 'middle' party: would the LibDems REALLY make a difference? Probably not. Party politics is dead, yet it's all we've got at the moment. A non-vote is thorn-in-the-side for the whole system, but is it the best way to use it?

The whole thing is a delicate balancing act, so whichever way you lean, consider the consequences of your choice rather than blindly following old paths or simply giving up. It may put the 'mock' in 'democracy', but I'd sure rather live with the system we have than with a military dictatorship or worse: it's well worth thinking globally to change your jaded local perspective.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Who should you vote for?

I was brave and took the test, and it turned out as expected (though only just!) Don't know whether there's an in-built bias, but, as the elections loom, it's worth checking out to see whether your stance on major UK issues matches your intended vote.

Of course, this completely ignores tactical voting...

Who Should You Vote For?

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Green


Your actual outcome:



Labour -17
Conservative -42
Liberal Democrat 80
UK Independence Party 24
Green 82


You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Socialising I - Hairdresser Chat

I've never been much of one for empty chit-chat, so it's interesting to analyse what it takes, what its mechanism is and what its point is.

It takes universal compatibility, that is being pretty much just like everyone else, or at least an ability to act as a simulacrum thereof. It consists in a broken, though potentially near-infinite string, of mindless platitudes and/or bursts of ego-driven self-aggrandisement. And its point ? Well, it appears that reassurance, a warm winciette comfort-blanket, is the ultimate goal and what does that say? It says that the ultimate driving force for most of humanity is fear - fear of being alone, different, insignificant; fear of purposelessness, pointlessness; fear of death.

So maybe when you no longer have the energy nor desire to exchange inanities with your hairdresser, you've come to terms with your own mortality ;-)

Sunday, April 17, 2005

52 Weeks to Make the World a Better Place: Week 17 - Pick up litter, don't just moan about it!

If you're the sort of person who runs to apoplexy on seeing the discarded detritus of other people's pointless existences, deal with it positively by removing the offending items to a designated area (read 'bin') - you'll feel better and will actually be abetting your own cause!

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Orders of Infinity

I picked up this rather neat logical 'trick' from a book called 'Theories of Everything' by John D. Barrow. Any person of reasonable intelligence would, without specialist knowledge, surely think that 'infinity' is a single concept. I know I did. Take, as an example, the set of whole numbers. You could begin writing them down and never stop... onwards to infinity.

Now take the set of 'irrational' numbers (that's all numbers that cannot be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers). Intuitively, you might say that there are an infinite number of such numbers between 0 and 1, therefore there must be more of them than whole numbers, but then the concept of infinity comes swinging back in and you think, "Well, infinity is infinity, so it's all the same." But, your intuition was correct! Here's the 'proof':

Imagine writing down ALL these irrational numbers (impossible, but stay with me here). Here is what a small section looks like, all completely random:

...
0.125486312856...
0.956476213163...
0.614585484764...
0.437644646468...
0.316546416485...
0.731515565855...
0.265475487964...
0.632995245513...
...

Now take a number formed by taking a diagonal down through all those (1st digit from 1st number, 2nd digit from 2nd number... etc.):

0.15464544...

Now add 1 to all the digits:

0.26575655...

This number is different from every single number written down because it must differ in at least one digit from each (by the addition of that 1). Hence, you thought you wrote down every number possible, but there are clearly many more. Irrational numbers are said to possess a higher order of infinity than whole numbers. Expressed more poetically, does infinity require, for its expression, an infinite number of grains of sand, or, as Blake suggested, can you

"... see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."?

Sunday, April 10, 2005

52 Weeks to Make the World a Better Place: Week 16 - Subscribe to an 'Ethical Consumer' Guide

This is always a great place to start if you're feeling strongly committed, perhaps more doubtful if you're not. The sheer bewildering heaps of statistics and facts never before investigated may provide the energy of anger necessary for full and vigorous dedication to a new and more mindful lifestyle... or it may all look so daunting that it puts you off for life. Be your own judge here.

52 Weeks to Make the World a Better Place

I'm sure that there are many such guides published in various forms - newspaper articles, books, websites..., possibly ad nauseum. This one is intended as a kind of drip-feed version, to stimulate flagging interest at a regular interval. I shall attempt to publish each Sunday/Monday, my time, but there will inevitably be a few that fall outside the window so I'll apologise in advance (perhaps I should apologise for the assumption that such an apology is necessary?!#@).

But why bother? Well, there are so many smart-ass aren't-I-a-clever-bastard-'cos-I'm-so-cynical blogs about, I thought it time to redress the balance with a little simple positivism. But 52 is enough - I'll publish as a rolling cycle (will A Different Corner still be here in a year?) as no-one, surely, will remember a blog entry from a year previously. Or am I being a cynical bastard?

Friday, April 01, 2005

Website update

One of the things I always planned to do with this blog is to anounce my website updates. So now, all you have to do is install a suitable RSS aggregator (see recommendation 'Abilon' on the Freeware page) and subscribe to this blog (use the URL "http://padleywood.blogspot.com/atom.xml" without quotes). That way, you get all recent feeds including the monthly website update. Go on, treat yourself!

This month:

General: this month, the website celebrates its 3rd birthday with a 'Focus on Freeware' issue!

Books: new Poem of the Month.

Drink: new Drink of the Month ('The Cranberries' - Finlandia Cranberry Vodka and cranberry juice, with 4 recipes).

Food: time once again to head down Mexico way for the Recipe of the Month. There are also new recipes for couscous, gnocchi and wraps.

Fractals: new Fractal of the Month.

Freeware: as well as Spotlighting the wonderful Maxthon browser (see below), there are some other excellent programs reviewed this month, plus some 'passengers' dropped, as the whole section gets a spring clean.

Garden: new Garden Tip

Links: this month, Spotlight on... (usually a site new to me, but could be an old favourite):


This browser (Maxthon) just gets better! I cannot recommend it enough, hence the Spotlight. In addition to the existing review, I'll mention some of the add-on features available via the DAILY updates. Essential is the RSS feed plugin that now comes bundled as standard. Add feed from the plugin site, click the sidebar tool and you get a list of recent updates(with tooltip descriptions) in the sidebar, without having to visit the website. Click an item to open its webpage in a new browser window where you can download and read a fuller description.

Other invaluable plugins include Weather feed and LookUpWord, both sidebar, and CloseTabs (9 options - most useful for me is close all to right) and CopySelection (copies selected text plus page title and URL to the clipboard), both toolbar.

I've also been spring-cleaning the links too, deleting dead links and updating those that have moved.