In my current carriage, which has about 60 seats and a buffet bar (closed) there are 14 people standing or sitting on the floor, which can't be safe. Are there any rules governing the number of passengers allowed on a train, or is any number ok as long as the doors shut?
Having seen some of the local commuter trains on there way into Waterloo (which could carry more people only if they were minced and sprayed into the carriage through holes in the roof) I suspect there are no limits at all and this begs the question "why use even moderately comfortable carriages?". It can only be a matter of time before the current medium-distance trains are replaced by their short-haul cousins, at which point working from home will look increasingly attractive.
I may have mentioned this before, but the 0650 train from Southampton Airport Parkway to London Waterloo is unusually quiet and relaxed on a Friday. Monday to Thursday the train is full when it departs and it gets worse after picking up more passengers in Winchester; the stress generated by lots of people competing for seats is tangible and pretty unpleasant. By contrast, the Friday train is only half full when it leaves Winchester (although it normally fills at the next stop, Woking) and this makes an enormous difference to the quality of the journey because the atmosphere is very much more relaxed.
I’m sure that it isn’t economically or physically practical to run this number of empty seats (or, in fact, any) on the Monday to Thursday services (they’d need to at least double the number of carriages) but I can now understand the appeal of First Class travel (where there are fewer seats per carriage). It isn’t the free coffee, the comfortable waiting room at the station or even the large seats; it is simply that First Class carriages carry fewer people and produce lower levels of stress. My season ticket expires in mid-January; I might try a monthly First Class ticket, just for comparison, you understand.
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
This is easier said than done, and it can take some time to fathom the train's modes of operation. The reward is a reliable seat on an otherwise packed service and a comfortable ride to Waterloo. The professional traveler is identified by his rested composure when he reaches his destination.
Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.
Saturday it was a boat trip to see the seals near Padstow, yesterday body-boarding from the beach at Polzeath. On Saturday, of course, the sun was out and the weather was hot – ideal for a trip to the beach. Yesterday, the clouds came in, the sun hid and it was a long chilly walk from the car park to the water (well, about 300 yards, I guess). Body boarding isn’t something we’ve done before, so we were fully prepared to make ourselves look stupid; I hadn’t expected to look quite as daft as I did, however, when I struggled into my hired wetsuit only to be told by a passing lifeguard that the zip goes at the back. Obvious, I suppose, but there you go.
When we eventually made it to the water (and, incidentally, what is one supposed to do with car keys?) we experienced an initial “that’s bloody cold” moment but, once our feet had numbed and the waves were breaking around our chests, the cold was forgotten and we concentrated on floating.
Body-boarding turns out to be relatively easy, although it probably helps if you know what you’re doing when you enter the water. Surreptitious glances at our fellow be-suited swimmers suggested that we weren’t really getting onto the board properly; mastering that allowed us to shoot inland at a decent speed- great fun.
Today we hired bikes and cycled from Padstow to Bodmin for lunch. Not a bad ride, about 11 miles each way, but we haven’t done a lot of cycling recently and it puts a strain on the muscles.
Tomorrow we’re off to the Eden project; we haven’t seen it since 2001, so it will be interesting to see what has changed.
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.Sir Winston Churchill
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
I have been using Micro soft Office 2007 for a couple of months and, in general, I am impressed. Many of the changes are cosmetic but there are also some really nice improvements (the table auto-formatting in Excel, the near-text format box in Word) that ease everyday use of the product.
There are also things I don’t like, like the way that the cursor jumps between pages 1 and 3 in Word if you display two pages side-by-side. I don’t remember this happening in previous versions, and it is frustrating to be unable to key to the next page. Page Up and Page Down behave in a similar fashion, so the application is consistently annoying and, for me, it reduces the usefulness of simultaneous display of two pages.
Empty space is not empty, but is filled with the quantum vacuum, with endless virtual processes. The energy of the quantum vacuum, the zero-point energy is infinite according to our present theories. Clearly, this infinity is an artifact - it would make the electromagnetic field infinitely massive, because energy and mass are related according to Einstein's E=mc^2. The empty electromagnetic field would collapse under the weight of its own gravity. Some unknown mechanism beyond quantum electromagnetism must regularize the infinity of the electromagnetic vacuum energy. Nevertheless, the zero-point energy results in perfectly finite and experimentally confirmed facts, for example the Casimir force.
The EU has come up with a great way to reduce the EU wine lake; pay farmers to produce less wine (source). The over-production, which results in vast quantities of cheap wine being turned into industrial vinegar, has two root causes:
1) Increased production of good-quality wine outside the EU has reduced demand for French, Spanish and Italian wines,
2) The EU’s protectionist policies have successfully kept alive some businesses that should have gone to the wall years ago and prevented consolidation within the industry.
In a free-market economy, subsidies would not be paid and companies would stand or fall according to their abilities. The current system protects weak companies and hinders the growth of their more successful competitors. The obvious solution is to de-regulate the market, phase out the subsidies and free vineyards to compete and succeed to the best of their abilities.
I read with relief that the floods that have affected much of the UK are in fact a punishment from God for the country’s poor performance in the Moral World Cup last year (according to the Bishop of Carlisle; link). That’ll be a relief to the insurance companies, who presumably will now avoid lots of claims, but is the Church really claiming responsibility on behalf of God? Terrorists often claim responsibility for acts of violence to enhance their reputation or political power; it looks like the Church of England is going the same way.
Everyone is making to-do lists for the new Government. Here, in no particular order, is mine:
They need to give up this notion of 'difference'. However, in order to do this they must give up the idea of having exclusive access to truths provided by God, the notion of "God's chosen people" has to go and the idea that some of us are hell bound and others saved really has to go.
My new solution for reducing train over-crowding is simple; double the price of tickets on trains that arrive in
Price increases would pretty much guarantee seats for annual season ticket-holders, but this addresses only the symptoms of the problem. In the short-term, a combination of timetable, pricing and rolling-stock changes might address the over-crowding, but train operating companies still have no incentive to provide seats for their passengers and this is something that the Regulator needs to address.
Don't you know Stalin was an atheist? That's the way it goes. First you read Richard Dawkins. Then you have an abortion. Then you're putting a fresh coat of paint on the Gulag.
Well, I assume it is a resident; it might just have been an uppity visitor...
The Ouija board has been around for centuries, dating as far back as 500BC. Its main use is to contact the dead in a “séance”. Many Christians find this practice to be morally wrong because demons can enter the mind of the “medium” and be unleashed into the world. The Ouija board is currently sold by Parker Brothers.
More news later, if I make it...
This afternoon, we are off to Southampton to see Rebecca at the cinema. Review later.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Some of the costings for the Government’s new road charges have been leaked and they seem to confirm what many have long suspected; the system is going to be hugely expensive to setup (possibly as high as £62bn) and administer (£8bn per year) and collection costs will be a high proportion of revenue raised. This is an almost perfect definition of a bad tax.
There are two main reasons for a new tax; to raise revenue or to alter behaviour. If the scheme costs anything like the suggested amounts, raising revenue is going to be difficult; the charge will have to run for years to pay back the setup costs.
This scheme will force cost-sensitive drivers from the motorways onto A roads and country lanes where they will have more accidents, burn more fuel and take far longer to reach their destination. It will also discourage overseas visitors, who will be unwilling to pay £600 to have the tracking device fitted to their cars.
On top of all that, it will still be necessary for fuel duty to rise to continue the trend towards smaller, more efficient cars; without this rise, drivers will revert to larger, less-efficient cars as the price of fuel drops relative to their income.
To my mind, neither side has yet delivered a knockout blow but Sam Harris is a very long way ahead on points. By the time of Sullivan’s last entry (5th February) he was reduced to simply stating that he believed in God and that no argument or evidence could be conceived that would change this belief. Harris responded with:
I am, of course, unconvinced by your response. But this can hardly disappoint you, as it was not intended to convince me. You simply wrote to inform me that you have never doubted God's existence, cannot account for how you came to believe in Him, and are well aware that these facts will not (and should not) persuade me of the legitimacy of your religious beliefs. I now feel like a tennis player, in mid-serve, who notices that his opponent is no longer holding a racket.
...a rise in the minimum wage to €1,500 ($1,950) a month, penalties on companies that pay dividends rather than reinvest profits, an interest-free loan of €10,000 for every 18-year-old, unemployment benefit worth 90% of previous salary and an end to job contracts with easy firing rules .Link to source.
I am on a train again, this time heading north to
The weather, as I head into the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, is decidedly damp and unpleasant, much as it was in
Hi,
Stumbled across your site via a link from the Richard
Dawkin's Foundation (great site, by the way - well worth a
visit).
Just wanted to say that your satirical lampooning of
ridiculous Christian beliefs is very nicely done. Keep up the good work! I
particularly like the way you list some of the Bible's most bizarre and
unpleasant verses as "Unrelated deep thought".
Brilliant.
Cheers, James
More news as it comes in...
Today is the first time this year that we’ve had snow on the ground in the South. As normal, the snow is only on cars and at the edges of the road (it’s too warm for a blanket) but that was enough to cause delays on the roads. As I travelled north towards
Note to self for future – never miss the 07:08 fast train in favour of the 07:23 slow train; it adds an hour to the journey and the reduced stress of a near-empty train doesn’t make up for this
On Monday evening I had to endure two particularly difficult radio interviews. The first was with Lord McGinnis, who tried to defend RUC collusion with Loyalist murderers; his argument that times were difficult held no water whatsoever. The second was with Gerry Adams, a man with whom I’ve never previously agreed, taking a moderate, sensible and well-argued line over the issue; his point that, had the murders taken place in
In the light of the most recent report into the failings of the RUC, three things must now happen:
1) The rules regarding handling of informers and investigation of suspected criminal offences must be followed; there can be no leeway given to individual officers to break or ignore the rules.
2) The people responsible for the repeated failure to follow the rules (Special Branch officers, senior policemen, politicians, judges etc.) must be punished; there can’t ever be circumstances where the police (and thereby the State) are allowed to collude with criminals in order to assume the roles of Judge, Jury and Executioner.
3) The murder investigations, abandoned to protect police informers, must be reopened and the guilty brought to justice.
Throughout the troubles in
