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… but particularly we dedicate this to Professor Turney, who may have done more to raise awareness of the veracity of the AGW thesis since someone somewhere said something about hockey sticks… (hat tip to Samizdata commenter Mr. Ed, who may or may not be a talking horse, of course) January 2nd, 2014 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Professor Turney’s expedition was supposed to repeat scientific investigations made by Douglas Mawson a century ago and to compare then and now. Not unreasonably, it has been pointed out Mawson’s ship was never icebound. Sea ice has been steadily increasing, despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s gloomy forecasts. Had the expedition found the slightest evidence to confirm its expectation of melting ice caps and thin ice, a major new scare about the plight of the planet would have followed. As they are transferred to sanctuary aboard the icebreaker Aurora Australis, Professor Turney and his fellow evacuees must accept the embarrassing failure of their mission shows how uncertain the science of climate change really is. They cannot reasonably do otherwise. January 2nd, 2014 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
On a Tuesday evening shortly before Christmas, I arrived at London Gatwick Airport on an Easyjet flight from Morocco. I wanted to travel to my home in Southwark as quickly as possible. The quickest and simplest way to do this is to catch a train from Gatwick Airport railway station in the terminal to East Croydon and then London Bridge, followed by another train to South Bermondsey, the nearest station to my home. A single ticket for this journey costs £14.60, a fare I find to be a bit steep. Knowing the fare system reasonably well, I instead purchased a ticket to East Croydon, the first station inside Greater London at which the train stopped. For this, I paid £4.50. I then used my Oyster Card – the contactless ticketing system that Londoners use for most of their public transport journeys within London – to get to South Bermondsey. This was charged using the zone based fare system that applies within London, and cost me £2.20. I was thus able to reduce the cost of the journey by more than 50%. This is not fare evasion. What I did is perfectly legal, and I can’t be punished for doing it, but surely it is against the spirit of the fare laws. The powers that be have decided that the wealthy plutocrats who can afford to fly Easyjet can also afford to pay £14.60 for a train journey from central London to the airport. By taking advantage of the cheaper fares available for shorter journeys, I am demonstrating my contempt for the wise decisions of these people. Let us call it fare avoidance. As it happened, a ticket inspector stopped me part of the way through the journey, and berated me for my lack of public spiritedness and civic responsibility, and just generally told me off for failing to spend money that rightly belonged to the families of good, honest people such as ticket inspectors. How would such people be able to feed their families if everyone behaved like this? Actually, no he didn’t. What he actually said was “Thank you sir. That’s great”. It’s also possible he wished me a merry Christmas. January 2nd, 2014 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
We all love those daft things that school children put on exam papers – How long is the menstrual cycle? Three feet; that sort of thing. So, here are some from a hundred years ago (when they didn’t have such things as menstrual cycles):
Some of the others might turn out to be even funnier if I understood them. January 1st, 2014 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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