Stop the children
I was listening to the radio this morning (BBC Story) and they had a representative from a charity (Alcohol Concern I think) who was saying the government should be prosecuting the parents of under 15s who are given alcohol. Now while I’m sure that all the police officers that are sitting around doing nothing would love to pop round to peoples houses and check that no 14 year old is having half a glass of wine with the sunday roast how is this possibly enforcable? And if not, whats the point of having a the law in the first place?
I’m not sure that such a measure would combat the things that people are worried about i.e. antisocial behaviour and assualt. I had alcohol when I was this age at home and whilst I’ve had the odd time at uni where I’ve gone way to far it’s never been a problem. Is this just another example of the so called ‘Nanny State’ trying to hold our hands or am I an exception to the rule?
Over the last few years I haven’t really paid much attention to politics but when I look back there has been a shift in responsibility from the individual to whatever form of enforcement is appropriate, ie do what you like and we’ll tell you when its wrong. For example professionals nowdays are suffering because of the increased monitoring that they have to endure - let them get on with the job that they are good at (I’m sure Charlotte would have something to say about that!). Doctors are starting to be told what medicines to provide rather than letting them make a proffessional judgement, teachers must constantly evaluate their students to ensure that they are performing and I bet the police have endured the same kind of treatment - if the stories about increased red tape in the system are to be believed.
The burden of responsibility should lie with the individual and this I think, in the past, was enforced initially by peer pressure. You didn’t drop that sweet wrapper on the pavement because the old guy on the other side of the street was watching. Now however the lack of respect that has been brought about by this shift in responsibility ensures that these simple pressures no longer affect us - is it really that simple or are there other things at work?
Good Hunting
Nintendo are back?
The BBC report that Nintendo profits are up following a 90% sales increase. That’s a hell of a sales increase! This is all down the the DS which is popular with girls and older users and the success of the Wii which has suprised a lot of people. I think that this is brilliant news, Nintendo have (in my opinion) always been innovators in the games industry but they have been suffering at the hands of and Sony and Microsoft until recently. Their approach with the DS and the Wii has been to try and create a social atomosphere around gaming rather than the lonely introverted worlds of so many games. This has brought them a lot of success rencently basically because it’s fun and everyone can have a go, you no longer need to know the intricacies of WASD or circle strafing, you can just rely on swing the controller like a tennis racket.
I’d like to think that this means that developers and other companies follow suite and give people some more fun and social games to ensure that we can all play together - I wonder how many relationships end each year due to one or the other playing games non stop? Or how many children don’t see the outside? Some of the sports games make you want to go and do the sport for real and that can never be a bad thing. I’m waiting for the fencing game…
Good Hunting
Change of style…
Ok I changed the theme, and then I have hacked at the code to get it to look like this. Any comments? And yes I have done some work today Charlotte! I quite like the look although I’m not 100% sure about a few things yet so there are still more changes in the pipeline!
The site should also be much quicker now. It is for me anyway. Once I’m sure that this is all working I’ll set to work on transferring Charlies blog across - that shouldn’t be as much effort as this one because it’s all just standard code.
Good Hunting
Gliese 581
This morning at about 7.30 I got a message on my phone and whilst I racked my brains to think who might be sending me a message at that time I said exactly that to Charlotte. When I looked it was from Ben, and even stranger it was about a new planet that has been spotted, now whilst I’m not quite as excited as Ben about it, it’s quite a find.
Scientists - well astronomers have found (who lost it?) the planet orbiting around a star called Gliese 581 in the Libra constellation 20.5 light years away. The planet falls into the so called ‘Goldilocks’ zone, i.e. a band of space that means a planet could support life. This means that the planet could have liquid water flowing over its surface and it’s size means that it should be a lump of rock like ours. So all the precursors of life are there…? Well not quite, they may be but there’s a whole lot of other factors that we have no idea about. For a start we don’t know what the precursors of life are! But if we’ve found another planet that could support life then that does open the door to finding a lot more of them and therefore increases the chances that we are not alone.
Richard Dawkins wil be put to the test now, in one of his books (I can’t remember which one off the top of my head - I’m inclinded to go with Unweaving the Rainbow) said that given the right conditions life is almost enevitable because once it’s got started there’s no stopping it, and that though the moment of beginning although very unlikely (Too many zeros to write) it only has to happen once in the billion or so years that it could happen in.
So could we be looking at a different form of life? Are they looking back? Who knows? Apparently they might start to look for methane in the atmosphere…
Good Hunting
We’re live again
Ok, everything has been transferred - well the posts & pages etc… It’ll probably take a while to get everything back to normal though as I’ve updated the version to so somethings are not quite compatible…
Good Hunting