This is just boring now:

A decision to put road signs in Polish on a busy road had nothing to do with political correctness, council chiefs claimed yesterday.

Eight temporary diversion signs, written in Polish, were placed around the Cheshire-Shropshire border at the request of Cheshire County Council. The signs, which explain how to reach Whitchurch while road works are being carried out on the A49, were condemned by some as “political correctness gone mad”.

Helping people understand things is ‘political correctness’, now? In fact these are diversion signs, which aren’t necessarily familiar to the many Polish lorry drivers using the area. Yeah, people shouldn’t be using the roads if they don’t understand and taking-our-jobs-never-had-sat-navs-in-my-day-whiny-blah. Can you imagine if ’some’ campaigned for a worthwhile cause?

The One O’Clock news just claimed Thorntons are reporting 1 in 5 customers buying two of the same Valentine’s gift, and putting different names on each. At the risk of embarrassing myself: there is no way this is true. Even if you accept the dubiously high number of affairs, there’s no chance so many would have the sheer nerve to ask for that in a shop. And people really buy both¹ the exact same present? Also, the staff are really collecting stats on this kind of thing? I can’t find any references online and yes, I’m an optimist, but I don’t believe it. It’s got to be a massive misquotation.

1. is there a male version of ‘mistress’? ‘Mister’? [↩]

Dr Ben Goldacre takes down Dr Ms. Gillian McKeith in this excellent Guardian article. For a start, he’s managed to get his dead cat the same non-accredited qualification she uses to call herself ‘doctor’. But it’s more than squabbling over her credentials: her ‘nutritional’ advice is bogus and outright harmful to the cause of medicine:

She talks endlessly about chlorophyll, for example: how it’s “high in oxygen” and will “oxygenate your blood” - but chlorophyll will only make oxygen in the presence of light. It’s dark in your intestines, and even if you stuck a searchlight up your bum to prove a point, you probably wouldn’t absorb much oxygen in there, because you don’t have gills in your gut. In fact, neither do fish. In fact, forgive me, but I don’t think you really want oxygen up there, because methane fart gas mixed with oxygen is a potentially explosive combination.

Future generations will look back on this phenomenon with astonishment. Channel 4, let’s not forget, branded her very strongly, from the start, as a “clinical nutritionist”. She was Dr Gillian McKeith PhD, appearing on television every week, interpreting blood tests, and examining patients who had earlier had irrigation equipment stuck right up into their rectums. She was “Dr McKeith”, “the diet doctor”, giving diagnoses, talking knowledgeably about treatment, with complex scientific terminology, and all the authority her white coat and laboratory setting could muster.

So back to the science. She says DNA is an anti-ageing constituent: if you “do not have enough RNA/DNA”, in fact, you “may ultimately age prematurely”. Stress can deplete your DNA, but algae will increase it: and she reckons it’s only present in growing cells. Is my semen growing? Is a virus growing? Is chicken liver pate growing? All of these contain plenty of DNA. She says that “each sprouting seed is packed with the nutritional energy needed to create a full-grown, healthy plant”. Does a banana plant have the same amount of calories as a banana seed? The ridiculousness is endless.

Her legal team is fierce (”If you said I wasn’t a doctor, I wouldn’t sue you; I’d roar with laughter.” says Dr. Goldacre), her sources and references dubious to say the least, and the way she treats people on her programmes deeply unpleasant. If the message were just ‘eat healthily’ nobody would have a problem, but her advice, it seems, goes beyond this into pseudoscience and causes deep confusion.

But let’s look at the evidence. Diet has been studied very extensively, and there are some things that we know with a fair degree of certainty: there is convincing evidence that diets rich in fresh fruit and vegetables, with natural sources of dietary fibre, avoiding obesity, moderate alcohol, and physical exercise, are protective against things such as cancer and heart disease.

But nutritionists don’t stop there, because they can’t: they have to manufacture complication, to justify the existence of their profession. And what an extraordinary new profession it is. They’ve appeared out of nowhere, with a strong new-age bent, but dressing themselves up in the cloak of scientific authority. Because there is, of course, a genuine body of research about nutrition and health, to which these new “nutritionists” are spectacularly unreliable witnesses. You don’t get sober professors from the Medical Research Council’s Human Nutrition Research Unit on telly talking about the evidence on food and health; you get the media nutritionists. It’s like the difference between astrology and astronomy.

I’m increasingly viewing the word ‘nutrition’ as a red flag - my skepticism level increases dramatically whenever it turns up.

Yesterday was Darwin Day, and I headed down to London for an evolution-themed afternoon. I met up with a coruscating someone just before lunch, and we headed across town through at-times-heavy rain. We tried to see Darwin’s grave in Westminster Abbey but balked at the £10 entrance fee - maybe we’d have paid that between us, but each is extortionate¹. Sheltering from the rain prevented us quite making it to Crockatt and Powell as we had an appointment at the Natural History Museum.

We’d booked tickets for the Explore Tour, which takes groups of seven behind the scenes of their huge and newly-built Darwin Centre to see some of the 22 million specimens on 27 kilometres of shelves. It was excellent. We saw Archie the Giant Squid, who lives in a £25,000 glass tank built with the help of Damien Hirst - apparently the source of expertise in glass cases - and has possibly the largest eye in the animal kingdom as well as suckers ringed by spikes. There was also a coelacanth, a section of the Thames whale - all the UK’s dead whales and dolphins are sent to the NHM for post mortems - and, possibly most exciting of all, type specimens collected by Darwin during the Beagle voyage. Our knowledgeable tour guide got drenched by the rain while showing us in and out, but was cheerful and friendly throughout. It’s a free tour that can only be booked on the day, and I highly recommend it if you get the chance.

I’d forgotten how grand the NHM is - it reminded us both of Hogwarts, although sadly the stairs remained stationary. We walked around various exhibits while avoiding scurrying children, and had a great time. Plus, of course, there was the foyer dinosaur, who never fails to impress.

The rain held off for the rest of the day, happily, and all too soon it was time to head back. We had a little trouble finding the platform at King’s Cross, mind:

Children were running into it as we left. Ouch.

Cephalopods, evolution, grandeur with an air of magic, and great company - what more could you ask for from a day?

1. to be fair, the Church of England clearly need the money [↩]

A few months ago it became apparent that people with Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange accounts were having problems with email. My post on the subject has had a lot of attention. The company’s email servers were repeatedly listed on spam databases, and email providers all over the world were therefore rejecting all received email. F/W/O showed no interest in fixing the problem. I don’t know whether it’s working yet, but I don’t really care - their service was appalling and I don’t recommend anybody use them again. Unfortunately there was little that could be done at the time without changing email address, a process which is never fun. Recent updates to Google’s Gmail service, however, have provided a way around the problem without changing address.

It works by replacing your current email system with Google’s free Gmail service. Gmail can now automatically download your F/W/O emails, as well as make it look like all email you send is coming from your old F/W/O address. It means moving to a web-based email system (or not, with a little more configuration - see optional section) and giving your email password to Google (I personally don’t think this is anything to worry about), but email recipients should notice no difference and it should work exactly the same as before, except that all email is actually coming from Google’s servers, which won’t be rejected as spam.

Initial experiments suggest this should work:

1. Go to www.gmail.com and sign up for a free email address
2. Log into your gmail account (called Google Mail in the UK), then go to ‘Settings’, and the ‘Accounts’ tab
3. New users should have a “Get mail from other accounts” option (if this option isn’t there try changing the display language to ‘English (US)’ in the ‘General’ tab). Click ‘Add another mail account’.
4. Enter your F/W/O email address and click to continue.
5. Enter your F/W/O username (this is your email address, as far as I know) and password. The POP server is ‘pop.orangehome.co.uk’ on port 110. You might want to tick ‘Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server’ while everything is getting set up, then remove it later. People familiar with Gmail can apply labels etc.. When all details are entered, click to continue.
6. It will ask if you want to be able to send email as ‘[your address]‘, click ‘Yes’, and then ‘Next Step’
7. Enter the name you want emails to appear to come from, and click ‘Next Step’
8. It will need to send a verification email to ensure you’re who you say you are. Click ‘Send Verification’, go check your email as normal, and follow the instructions.
9. Once you’ve verified the address, go back to ‘Accounts’. ‘Send mail as’ will contain a couple of different addresses. Click ‘Make default’ next to the F/W/O address.
10. That’s it! All email you send via Gmail will now appear to come from your F/W/O address, and Gmail will deliver all replies into your Gmail account.

I think this will do the trick. Please let me know the results if you try it…

To use Outlook Express / Outlook:

People who are using Outlook or Outlook Express (or Windows Mail, for that matter) and want to keep all their emails in one place / don’t want to use webmail can try this:

1. In Gmail’s settings, go to the ‘Forwarding and POP’ tab. Next to ‘POP Download’, click ‘Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on’, then ‘Save changes’.
2. Follow the instructions here to configure Outlook / Outlook Express (here for Outlook 2003). It’s probably wise to write down the existing configuration before changing too much over.

Email sent through Outlook/Express will appear to come from your F/W/O address as long as you’ve set it as Gmail’s default address in #9 above.

Notes:

This also lets you take advantage of Gmail’s formidable spam filters.

The changes were Google opening up to all users and releasing their POP3-fetching service, if you were wondering.

This would have been possible months ago if Orange provided an email forwarding service like normal ISPs.

Many many congratulations to Lil and Tom, who just announced they are engaged! Lil’s one of my oldest and best friends, and I couldn’t be happier for her.

They’re the first of my friends to get married, and I’m looking forward to the wedding already

Thursday:

Sunday:

As you may have gathered I was rather excited by the snow, and eagerly headed outside on Thursday to see how the world looked. The streets were very quiet and it was pleasant to walk around / stand in the middle of the road taking pictures. I headed down to Holy Trinity Church, which I thought might be pretty:

Continue reading ‘Wandering around Stratford in the snow’

It is working! Hooray for the man!

The heating problem itself turned out to be an easy one - the control knob wasn’t turned properly. I’d thought that yesterday, but every time I tried turning it the pilot went out. I’m unclear on whether this was muppetry on my part or some other problem, but it’s working now. However, he discovered a couple of other problems that require replacement parts, so will be back before long. The ‘overheat stat’ was broken, and this coupled with a leak via a broken valve means the pressure is too high in the rest of the boiler, which unfortunately he can’t release without installing some kind of release system into a pipe, and…I lost it there, but he seems to know what he’s doing.

Eventually the unit will conk out altogether - maybe another two years, he says - but I’m just happy it’s working for the moment. No need for my old-man blanket any more

I may soon have to get into bed, turn on the electric blanket, and read my book (Fahrenheit 451, ironically).

The British Gas man is due between 1200 and 1800. I’m hoping it’s nearer the former. Brrrrrrrrr.

Other than an unfortunate and spectacular attempt to climb a snowy bank this afternoon, today was going fine until the early evening. I was sitting at my desk when I realised I was colder than normal, and further investigation revealed the boiler’s pilot light had gone out. I re-lit it, but twenty minutes later was no warmer. The boiler was still alight and giving every appearance of running as normal, but wouldn’t accept any kind of bribe to produce hot water. Obviously it was the perfect day for a central heating breakdown…A British Gas engineer is booked for tomorrow afternoon, but I’ve had to evacuate to my parents’ for the night - it’s just too cold at home. I was nervous about the drive over, but happily the main roads were clear (and pleasantly free of traffic) and the snow hadn’t had a chance to freeze yet. Hopefully the boiler will be easily fixable!

There are people with sledges. I am so jealous.

Just back in after wandering around town for a couple of hours. My hands won’t move properly, my memory card filled up halfway around and I’m somehow bleeding, but goddamn it’s glorious out there. I’m just stopping in to empty the camera and grab some lunch, then I’m going back out.

It’s not snowing here yet, but everybody seems to be predicting there’ll be a lot overnight. This is EXCITING. The last time we had a decent amount of snow was 2004, when this happened, so it’s overdue. Everything will grind to a halt, of course, but that’s all part of the fun. Stratford’s preparing already - I’ve never seen the canal basin freeze over before:

I know snow isn’t all fun and games and does cause many problems, but I nevertheless can’t help thinking up people nearby to have surprise snowball fights with.

My mobile phone bill over the Christmas period was a little silly, and yesterday I finally got around to investigating it properly. My contract, which I assume made sense at one point, gave me 60 crossnetwork minutes, 4mb of data transfer and 60 text messages for £28ish/month. Proper investigation of the bills showed that the data transfer was about right, but I rarely used more than 15 minutes of calls per month, and text messages were regularly breaking 150, which at 10p a time really mounts up. I called Orange and was told my contract expired last July. This was rather a surprise, but put me in a great position to negotiate: I could investigate the best deals and see whether Orange would match them when I threatened to leave.

After much digging I finally realised that the only reason to keep paying £30/month is if I want a high-end phone. I do, but not that much. My current 7610 isn’t particularly clever by N80 standards, but is far from obsolete, and everything I fancy costs silly money. I’ve ended up downgrading to Orange Pay-As-You-Go, which offers surprisingly good deals: I get 300 free text messages providing I top up with a minimum of £10 every month. £10 should cover my meagre calls and data usage just about perfectly (even if call charges are higher than contract rates). The Orange rep. couldn’t really argue when I said that PAYG was better value for money for my particular usage, and was happy to let me downgrade and keep my number. Once I can afford the extra expense of line rental I’ll start looking at new contract deals, but I think this is the correct move for the moment.

FYI anybody who buys a Three contract via Quidco can get £100 cashback within a couple of months, without having to fill out oodles of paperwork. That’s according to the moneysavingexpert forum, which I found to be a very useful resource.