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March 2019

Umm, yes

Beatles fans looking to visit the Abbey Road crossing have wasted thousands of pounds taking a long and winding road to the wrong station.

Rather than going to St John’s Wood Tube station, in north-west London, many Beatlemaniacs instead went to Abbey Road station in the city’s east.

A Freedom of Information request by Telegraph Money showed that 1,171 journeys were made from the Abbey Road station on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) to St John’s Wood on the Jubilee line in 2018. The majority of these are thought to have been lost Beatles fans.

Assuming these were all adult single fares, fans would have spent £2,959.40 to get back to the right location.

Must have been a very boring afternoon in the Telegraph offices when they cooked up that info request….

Lordy be there’s a richness to this

The seizure, the second in two wekks, resulted in the delay of the launch of the book titled ‘Democracy Works: Turning Politics To Africa’s Advantage’, co-authored by Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills.

Obasanjo apologized to the audience about the delay in launching the book, saying most people could not get the book after it was seized at the Robert Mugabe International Airport.

Sure the poverty of Zim, but there’s that richness to the story.

Two uteri, wonder how that works?

A 20-year old Bangladeshi woman was in for an overwhelming surprise last week when she delivered twins, 26 days after having given birth to a boy.

According to news reports from Dhaka, Arifa Sultana Iti from Sharsha Upazila was rushed to the Khulna Medical College hospital in nearby Jessore on 25 February, following complications with her pregnancy.

Within hours, she gave birth to a premature baby boy through normal delivery and returned home soon after with her baby. But the doctors had missed the presence of her second uterus.

No, I know roughly how the second uterus existing works.

However, ain’t it hormones that leads to the actual birth? Contractions, cervix opening and all that? And while there are two uteri there’s only one bloodstream carrying hormones. So, why don’t the two uteri go into birthing mode at the same time?

One obvious answer is dunno given the rarity of the underlying uteri doubling. But anyone know more?

O Tempora, O Mores

She said that in principal restorative policies are fine but poor implementation can lead to teachers becoming “disempowered” and discipline getting worse.

The Telegraph used to catch those….

In recent years there has been a rise in popularity of restorative justice policies in schools, prompted by a greater focus in the principle in the criminal justice system, according to Ms Keates.

See?

OK, and?

Drinking a bottle of wine increases women’s cancer risk as much as smoking 10 cigarettes, research suggests.

The British study says that for men, drinking a bottle of wine a week increases the absolute lifetime risk of cancer equivalent to smoking five cigarettes weekly.

This is due to the risk of cancer in parts of the body such as the bowel, liver and oesophagus,

For women, it has a similar impact to 10 cigarettes a week, mostly due to an increased risk of breast cancer caused by alcohol, researchers from the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Bangor University and University of Southampton found.

The thing we’d really like to know here. The booze in those quantities increases lifespan on average because of the protective effects upon other things that might kill us. So, is that true of the cigarettes too?

Well, yes, and what is to be done?

Sharron Davies: Vladimir Putin could send his tenth best man to win a sack of medals as a woman
Sharron Davies has competed in an uneven field. She explains to Martyn Ziegler why she wants strict controls on transgender athletes.

Reality being that bit that doesn’t go away when you wake up. So, what’s the solution?

Well, either women’s sport continues to exist or there are some rules beyond self-declaration on what is a woman. And the societal answer is going to be?

Silenced?

I am sick of being silenced by social-justice warriors whose self-assurance is only matched by their ignorance
ALLISON PEARSON

I share the distaste for the cultural fascists. But silenced when you’ve a national newspaper column?

Anyone able to point me to an acoustics expert?

As part of this ickle problem with the flat. Thinking about getting someone in to properly advise. The initial stage of which is to try and have a conversation about what the problem is, likely solutions etc.

So, anyone actually know someone who knows about acoustics and domestic spaces?

I can imagine varied potential solutions. Cavity walls maybe, are there types of double glazing with vacuum in them? Would that even help? How about trying to just deflect sound with a bit of perspex? There will be people out there who do this for a living. So, given the incredible knowledge space of you readers, anyone know anyone who does?

The basic problem, music source at 120 dB (possibly 130) at 20 metres distance. How do we get that down to just mild background internally? Without killing the DJ that is.

Umm, well, you know what?

This doesn’t match any reasonable description of the world I see outside my window:

Her experience is the end result of a breathtakingly sexist assumption (perpetuated by media, advertising and our wider culture) that women exist primarily as potential partners for heterosexual men, that they owe men their time and attention without question, and that they are rude, arrogant or ungrateful if they dare to decline sexual attention.

I can think of varied Mullahs around and about who might think that way but us, today? It ain’t, is it?

Is there no joy Brexit won’t provide?

Gender pay gap expert among top professors quitting Brexit Britain
Leading academics in climate policy and economics have also had enough of hostility – and funding goes with them

Joy, joy to behold:

When the EU referendum result was announced Vera Troeger, professor of quantitative political economy at Warwick University, was at an academic conference in Brussels. She spent the whole day crying. Today she has had enough, and is leaving the country where she has built her career.

Troeger, an expert on the gender pay gap and the impact of parental leave policies on productivity, was associate editor of one of the most highly ranked academic journals in political science. She has been in the UK for 14 years and loves Warwick, but she has accepted a professorship at the University of Hamburg. After more than two years of uncertainty, she says other European colleagues, too, are preparing to go.

“I have a lot of academic friends over here from Spain, Italy and France, and they have all congratulated me on leaving all this behind,” she says. “Of course the academics who will be able to leave are mostly the successful ones. It will be a brain drain.”

Last week Universities UK, the vice-chancellors’ body, criticised the government for failing to provide enough protection for research in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

The government pledged to underwrite awards from the European Research Council’s €77bn (£67bn) seven-year Horizon 2020 programme. But furious academics have discovered that while existing grants will be covered, there is no funding for new applications in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Horizon 2020 funding being allocated to those who push the EU’s line on such matters anyway, right?

So, good riddance.

Hang her

When members of the public bought tickets to a rousing celebration of the world’s best-loved classical music on Saturday night, they were promised indoor fireworks, thundering cannons and can-can girls in the aisles.

They were probably not expecting the stage of the Royal Albert Hall to become a political battleground, after a soprano donned the colours and flag of the European Union for her turn in the spotlight.

Anna Patalong, who spent Saturday at the London protest march to demand a second referendum, wore yellow and blue with a distinctive necklace of stars, in what appeared to be a defiant message to the electorate through the prism of classical music.

And as concert organisers, determined that the night not be hijacked by disagreements over Europe, asked her to change back into the dress she had worn for the previous performances, her husband took to social media to complain about her mistreatment.

Sorry. Ecks has been in and writing the headlines. Altho’ recall, it’s only treason if you lose.

An actual differentiation between paedophile and ephebophile

This looks like it has been decided properly:

A gay headteacher has won a sex discrimination case against the primary school which sacked him for having sex with two 17-year-olds he met on the dating app Grindr.

Matthew Aplin, 42, who was principal at Tywyn Primary School in Sandfields, West Glamorgan, was openly gay according to a new court ruling. But while police and his local authority bosses decided no criminal offence had been committed the school governors decided to dismiss him.

He challenged their decision but in the end resigned, then claimed he was a victim of constructive dismissal and mounted an employment tribunal claim on the basis he was a victim of “unfair dismissal and sexual orientation discrimination.”

The sexual orientation bit I’m not so sure about. A bird who’d shagged two male teenagers, a bloke who’d shagged two female, they would not have been fired. But he was. Hmm, not sure about that.

But note he was at a primary school. There’s a hell pf a difference between paedophilia and ephebophilia. And as long as there’s no duty of care to those ephebes – which as a primary school head there won’t be, not unless he’d been grooming them for a decade – then this seems the right answer from the court. Even if the reasoning is off.

Well done to Ritchie

Third, new concepts of value are, then, essential. In particular, the human value to innovate in the face of necessity is the real capital of society as we face this transition, but how to account for that is an almost unresolved question when the resulting intellectual property has to be shared for maximum impact, and not be restricted in use.

Ritchie intends to increase the quantity of bright ideas by reducing the value of bright ideas.

Well done there.

But there is a problem with this. It makes a balance sheet, and those who manage it, indifferent as to when a transaction take place, so long as the discount rate still makes it attractive in terms of contemplating it at all. So precisely when, for example, the transition to a sustainable economy takes place is not a matter of priority to this form of financial capitalism: if it pays eventually then provided the associated risks (and so discount rate) do not diminish its value to the point of insignificance then it remains attractive whenever it occurs. But as a society; as a race; and as businesses whose survival will also depend upon this transition happening by a point in time that indifference as to timing that financial capitalism implies is not just inappropriate but wholly conflicts with the requirement that this task be undertaken in little more than a decade.

As a result the indifference to time inherent in modern financial capitalism may be wholly inappropriate when considering the Green New Deal. But what that implies is that accounting will require a new concept of capital where the time that a transaction occurs does matter, very precisely. There can be no indifference as to progression towards a green transition in this type of reporting: that goal makes precise timing a matter of priority in itself.

The implication is very clear. First, such accounting makes clear that some assets that are now valued (e.g. oil related assets where the oil in question will have to be left in the ground) do no longer have value. It is simply not possible to presume asset life when there can be none.

Given the discount rate what is the value currently of those oil assets that we’ll not let anyone use in Year What?

He’s not even getting accounting right, is he?

Err, what?

The high rates of trans exclusion from potential dating pools are undoubtedly due in part to cisnormativity, cissexism, and transphobia — all of which lead to lack of knowledge about transgender people and their bodies, discomfort with these unknowns, and fear of being discriminated against by proxy of one’s romantic partner.

Wait a minute. Who we fancy getting our rocks off with is built into us from the get go. Yes? Gays are born not made?

Yet a continued preference for a woman – say – is cisnormativity, cissexism, if we choose that over some mildly sculpted simulacra?

It’s as if trans campaigners have absolutely no idea at all how sexual attraction works in human beings.

Sure, if all transwomen – have I got that the right way around, he definition is the destination, not source? – looked like Caroline Cossey there’d be a higher take up but anyone hand on heart want to say that is so?

Therefore

ITV weatherman Alex Beresford: I spoke out about knife crime on TV and then my cousin was stabbed

Don’t speak out about knife crime on TV for you cousin’s sake…..