Aniseed Balls

When I was a teenager, our class were caught gambling and the head decided to cane us. He lined us up to ask each child if they were involved. Nobody lied; the idea of dishonesty was much worse than the fear of corporal punishment. Boris Johnson is the exact opposite: a pathological liar; a delinquent who derives psychological satisfaction from the slightest deceit; from getting one over on people. And he covers up any exposed mendacity with further fabrications. He was unanimously found guilty of lying to the Head of State by eleven Supreme Court judges. He was fired from his job as a journalist for a campaign of systematic lies about the EU over a prolonged period and after multiple warnings. He conspired to deceive the nation before the Brexit vote with deliberately misleading financial propaganda, when the Treasury's own forecast for leaving was for significant long-term financial disadvantage. He knowingly lied about the difficulty of getting a Brexit settlement with the EU. W

  This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable. It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner. Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are different fo

The most important part of addressing regional inequality in the UK is funding. The new UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) is due to launch in April 2022. But what the government seem keen to hide is that this is just a replacement for EU structural funding that will soon end. The EU's European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund are allocated by looking at per capita GDP by region, and then member state governments have discretionary powers to reallocate some funds between regions. The UK used these powers to reassign some funds from England to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We also had an agreement for funds to be administered by our devolved governments. These two funds together support innovation and research, information technology, small- and medium-sized enterprises, employment-related projects and vocational skills training, including youth employment, as well as the promotion of a low-carbon economy. For the seven-year tranche of funding 2014-2020, t

It isn't hard to imagine a child being brought up by parents within a small community of bizarre cult beliefs. The child would initially accept the programming without question no matter how damaging, because that is what small infants are hard-wired to do. Later they might begin to question the ideas, but everyone they know would profess conviction and it is easy to see the difficulty of snubbing their entire community and becoming a social outcast. If we were able to rescue the victim from the grip of the cult, then even as an adult it would be difficult to reverse the damage. We would need to train the critical thinking skills that all cults must suppress to exist. Our efforts might well look like the popular notion of 'brainwashing'. This is precisely what the Chinese are being accused of with the Uighurs. Some are calling it "psychological torture", and even the BBC are calling it "systematic brainwashing". "Wait a minute," you say, "

Back in June I expressed concern that religious beliefs, and all the irrationality they foster, might be risk factors for ignoring the dangers of Covid-19, and thereby be contributing to the death rate. Ten weeks on, I want to give some examples of circumstantial evidence for this. In mid-July I went out to buy spices in Harehills, which is full of good ethic shops of many kinds. The area is 40% Muslim, mostly of Pakistani heritage, but with a significant minority born in EU Accession countries (since 2001). These figures come from 2011 census data . Judging from the shops and some local knowledge, many of these Europeans are from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania. I hardly need mention the grip Islam has on its working-class believers, and Poland is the most Catholic country in Europe with 93% adherence . Romania has 85% adherence , and Lithuania 81% . These figures come from the Wikipedia articles on those countries, and the Religion in Europe article shows that 'religiosity',

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha