There's a great cartoon entitled "the Vicar's Study" here. It's on the Church Times Blog. I'm not usually a great fan of the Church Times - it seems almost relentlessly anti-evangelical, but Dave Walker's cartoons are generally great.
Ah yes, and exams start a week today, so don't expect much in the way of posting.
Random stuff here...
One of the ways I like to look at where it'd be nice to visit on a holiday is by looking for UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Now I haven't been to that many of them, but all the ones I've been to have been really good and worth visiting.
I watched this documentary following 5 women going through abortions, with lots of interviews. Wow. I don't think the makers take either side, but it is very powerful. It's available to watch online for another few days.
Just watch (except for the bits where you have to look away), and just think about the word "conscience"... I think people know whether abortion is right or not...
It's really good seeing the BBC producing something sensible like this for a change!
An interesting contrast here, between two books on the Reformation, of a similar length, published at a similar time. Reformation - Europe's House Divided, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, and The Reformation World, edited by Andrew Pettegree.
To my mind, Pettegree is better in almost every single respect. It's easier to read, it's at a higher academic level (the people writing each chapter are experts in their field and the chapters are helpful summaries of the field; MacCulloch is an expert on England in the 1500s) and Pettegree is generally better reading for academia, for revision (my current concern) or for pleasure. Don't get me wrong - MacCulloch is a superb lecturer, and his book is a good overview of the European Reformation - it's just that Pettegree's book is better.
Except in one aspect - price. On Amazon.co.uk, MacCulloch's book is currently £25.60 in hardback or £8.99 in paperback. Pettegree is an astonishing £142.50 in hardback or £29.99 in paperback. Why the difference? I can only assume that the publishers are aiming one at the academic library market and the other at the popular market. But I can't see any reason for it.
I bought MacCulloch's book, but I keep getting Pettegree's out of the library.
I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
Albert Einstein, 1929
The discussions on several recent posts seem to be heading this way. It's worth saying that I tried to cope without a car for several years (10 after leaving school, including 5 in full-time employment). I then gave up, learned to drive, bought a car and now drive more than I should.
The problem with huge and unnecessary car use seems to be in several parts.
1) The way society is (or, more likely, isn't) designed means that people often need to have a car. Visiting family in rural areas, transporting furniture or weekly shopping, etc. I suggest this issue is very difficult to deal with, but its force would be weakened by tackling the others.
2) The cost of a car is heavily split into three categories - initial cost, yearly required stuff (servicing, tax, etc) and incremental cost (fuel, etc) that depends on distance. For convenience, we can split these into owning cost and driving cost - how much it would cost to own the car anyway, and how much it costs to drive it that bit more.
3) Public transport almost always seems to try to compete (if it competes at all) with the total cost of owning a car, whereas to persuade people not to drive, it needs to compete with the driving cost. If I get the bus to my girlfriend's house, it might cost me about £1.50 and take 30 mins or so. If I drive, it costs me about 60p and takes 10 mins. If I walk, it costs me very little and takes about 50 mins. I can't see why a car owner would want to use public transport for that journey. In fact, with things the way they are at the moment, I don't see why a car owner would ever use public transport, except for going somewhere with very poor parking.
4) I used to do a lot of cycling. Again, it's much harder to be motivated when it's competing with the cost of driving rather than owning a car. When I cycled regularly around South Manchester, the main problem was consistent lack of good cycle parking. Yes, there would be places to lock it, and then bits of my bike would get stolen, which was kind of annoying.
Back to more stuff that seems obvious...
Biofuels are a good idea, primarily for two reasons. 1) We can grow more of them a heck of a lot quicker than we can grow more oil, which also then gives us better control of prices. 2) The CO2 they release into the atmosphere is CO2 they took out of the atmosphere only a short while before.
However, growing biofuels on land previously used for agriculture is a less good idea because 3) the conventional ways of making biofuels (grow complex plant, harvest it, crush bits of it, maybe ferment them for a while and purify) is pretty inefficient, it would force the price of food up and it would take an awful lot of land to grow enough fuel to make a significant difference. So I'm not sure why sugar-based biofuels, for example, are being touted at all.
What seems much more sensible is something along the lines of GM algae (small organisms, photosynthetic), which either produce the fuel directly, or which do the first stage of an integrated, single-site process. Algae make sugar, yeast change sugar into alcohol, distillation of the alcohol by energy produced on-site.
And the obvious places for this are on land we are not currently using - i.e. deserts or ocean.
Hydrogen fuel cells are nifty, but they just store energy, so shift the producing problem elsewhere.
For some reason, some sensible filling of a stupid form by an architect has made the news. You can see the full form here.
It just seems the sensible thing to do, though the fact I'm prone to do that sort of thing quite a bit has on occasion got me into trouble. I remember filling in a risk assessment form for a school trip I was running, and including an assessment of the risk of alien abduction or nuclear war. The headmaster of course returned the form to me (with approval) pointing out that I hadn't done an assessment for an outbreak of some obscure disease.
But the time I really got some hassle was when applying for something with an organisation which I'm not going to name, but which might well rhyme with "Birch of England". This particular application seemed to filter people on the basis of their ability and liking for vast quantities of over-repetitive paperwork. So after the first two or three times of filling in personal details, I started inventing fictional children of mine with implausible Biblical names. And then came the medical form, which got unduly obtrusive about medical history of friends, relations, pets, etc.
One of the questions asked if I had restricted mobility. Now, I like clear communication, and I like avoiding jargon. And I know that "restricted mobility" is, in the way it is normally used, politically correct medical jargon for what would normally be called "physical disability". But it's actually a really stupid phrase, because "unrestricted mobility" is something that no-one has. But they didn't give me enough space to write all this, so I just commented that I couldn't fly unaided.
And a few weeks later, I got a phone call from an elderly gentleman with no sense of humour whatsoever who didn't seem able to understand that the words on the form could mean anything other than their jargon meaning. Oh well....
In Britain, a large number of smaller shops have been shutting for many years now. The most frequently blamed culprits are big supermarkets. I, however, think the blame largely lies elsewhere.
It seems obvious that if faced with three options:
1) walk half a mile to the local shops, then half a mile back with heavy bags
2) drive half a mile to the local shops, pay £2 for parking
3) drive two miles to a big supermarket, parking is free
Most people will take option 3). And yet in lots of places, the local shops continue to close, and people blame the supermarkets. There have even been utterly mad suggestions to force supermarkets to charge for parking.
The real solution seems simple. The availability of free or very cheap parking near to shops increases their attractiveness (as does good public transport). It is therefore in the shopkeepers' interests to make sure that such parking is available. And if the council want to keep the local shops open, it is in their interests as well.
Parking in towns should therefore be controlled either by federations of local shopkeepers or by the council running it at a loss (which may pay for itself indirectly via increased land values or tax paid by the shopkeepers). Subcontracting running car parks out to profit-making firms damages local shops when there is viable competition which does not charge for the use of its car parks.
This just seems obvious...
Is this the best comic book film adaptation of all time? It's certainly up there (IMO with Batman Begins and V for Vendetta, both of which, like Iron Man, actually have some plot). And from a physics geeky point of view, it's certainly one of the coolest. All the guys came out of the cinema wanting to be Iron Man, and most of the girls wanted to be with him.
Robert Downey Jr stars as a playboy genius weapons developer who gets kidnapped in Afghanistan by rebels and forced to build a super weapon. Most of the rest is fairly predictable, but it's great fun.
