Ideas for 'blog posts

As happens every now and then, life had caught up with and overtaken me, so here's a list of ten of the things I've scribbled down on bits of paper but haven't got round to posting yet:

1. Charity shops. Not necessarily a sign of a street being run down but a way for landlords to get a tasty tax reduction while they hang around and wait until somebody else does something magical to 'rejuvenate the High Street'.

2. The Daily Mirror did a bit of proper journalism for once and it turns out that about forty per cent of social housing which was sold off is now in the hands of landlords, some of them large scale investors.

3. Dual carriageways - they are not necessarily ugly. Anybody who has been to Berlin or Paris knows this.

4. Why the search for the graviton is futile. The best explanation for "gravity" is that it is an effect caused by distortions in space-time caused by the presence of massive objects. It seems pretty inconceivable to me that a particle could flit between distant objects and somehow pull them together.

5. They did a really complicated experiment about ten years ago to measure the speed of gravity. Rather unsurprisingly, they concluded that it propagates at the speed of light. Surely, measuring it can't be that difficult? You choose find something which measures gravitational forces very accurately and point it at e.g. the sun, preferably having fired it into some sort of orbit round the earth first. If the strongest force appears to be coming from where the sun appears to be, then gravity propagates at the speed of light. If it point towards where you know the sun actually is, then it propagates faster and so on.

6. That Russian town Chelyabinsk which was hit by a meteorite recently will be well known to lovers of World War II "documentaries" as Tankograd, the place where they built all the T-34 tanks. Whether the meteorite was wreaking some sort of Godwin's Law belated revenge for the defeats on the Eastern Front remains to be seen. I use the term "documentaries" advisedly, as actually they are just pornography.

7. History Of The World Part One. I like reading history books, especially those with a grand sweep and wider view. My personal short list of such books, sorted in order of length of period covered is:

A brief history of time, Stephen Hawking
A short history of nearly everything, Bill Bryson
Guns, germs and steel, Jared Diamond
Progress and poverty, Henry George
History of the twentieth century, Martin Gilbert
The Onion: Our dumb century
1984, George Orwell

Yes I know that The Onion is satire and 1984 is fiction). When you're read them all, you'll notice certain parallels on which they pretty much all agree.

8. Cool idea for a computer game. It's about an evil games/console manufacturer which wants to control the whole population by tricking them into staying at home playing a certain game. You battle yourself through various levels and try and get in touch with other people on the same quest, and the final level is when your group of rebels gets to the mainframe and blows it up or something. A message then flashes up on screen "Congratulations. You win. You are free! If you've learned your lesson you'll go outside into the fresh air or tidy up your room or something."

9. Why the natural human desire to make A Quick Buck while pretending to have done otherwise is anti-capitalist. This has little to do with the much maligned "short termism". And there are plenty of people who slave their whole lives merely in order to get their hands on some of the Quick Bucks which they see everybody else making.

10. Class A and B drug users. I was at a talk by a nice young man from Release (who actually looks just like his own photo. He was even wearing the same hat, despite the talk was indoors) and he explained that there are two main classes of drug users. I'm paraphrasing and simplifying here, but Class A is people with no jobs, no families, no support system (from broken homes, ex-army and so on) who takes drugs to try and escape their miserable lives. Class B is people with jobs, families, support systems etc. who take drugs purely as a leisure thing to enhance their otherwise pleasant lives. If you are going to have sensible drug policies, it is more or less impossible to do right by both classes. He also said the drug rehabilitation and therapy is more or less a complete waste of time and money. If you take drugs to escape your miserable life, then you won't come off them until your life stops being miserable. If you take drugs to enhance your pleasant life, then the treatment is a waste of time anyway, as most such users are quite happy taking them and usually get bored with it and give up anyway.