It's Been Too Long!

It has been too long since my last post, nearly 8 months!

I'll tell you something else that's been far too long as well: the clean up in Haiti. I can't believe that the so-called "United" Nations have let this go on without helping.

Statistic: Only 2% of the rubble has been moved since the earthquake

Surely this is a crime! It breaks my heart to see it on the news. I feel so helpless.

Do something about it, UN!

Money equals Happiness?

 Recently, a Brit won £56million on the Euro Millions lottery. When asked what he did to celebrate, he said:


"we went to Waitrose and had bacon rolls and sat there in silence" (or words to that effect).

I'm pretty sure that's what most of us would do! But while I sat there reading the story in the Metro (the best newspaper in print) it made me start to think. What would I do with £56millon? After a silent half hour or so, the best I could come up with was pay off my student loans. Then it made me think some more.

Was this the lucky ticket?

Does money make people happy?

In short, the answer should be yes! Why do people work? Why do people gamble? Why do people play the Euro Millions or the bingo? Answer: money! After all, it's not the money we actually want. It's what we spend it on, electricity, fuel, clothes, food and drink, luxuries etc. that we want/need. But winning such a huge amount, £56million, cash, no strings attached, completely liquid- spend it on whatever you want- cash?

Surely YES, you should be happy! But (and there's always a but with me!) let me make an analogy for you.

Imagine you're back in 1996 playing Tomb Raider. You've spent ages getting to around two thirds of the game and mastered some pretty tricky situations in the process. You then discover a cheat website which gives you the codes to make you invincible. You become invincible and at first it is a novelty! You go back to that bear you had to shoot from afar last time round and stand there punching it into submission (bear with me). Suddenly, Lara Croft's life has changed forever! She can go where she wants, do what she wants without the having to worry about anything. After about an hour, the novelty wears off and you can only stand so many bats swarming around you that you can't be bothered to shoot anymore and it starts to become irritatingly boring. You wish you'd never found the website in the first place but you can't go back and start again without the cheat on because it will feel futile and a waste of time.

Now replace Tomb Raider with life, Lara Croft with yourself. Replace the bear and the bats and the difficult bosses you breeze past with the cheat on with luxury items you've always dreamed of. Replace the cheat website with a lottery win. See where I'm going?

Maybe it's just me but if I don't have to work for something, I rarely appreciate it. Now I'm not saying that Nigel (our new lottery winner) will be irresponsible and squander the money. I just think that in the long run, a massive unearned (sometimes undeserved) windfall will result in more problems than solutions. Yes, with money comes opportunities, but like that wise old guy always says: "with great power comes great responsibility".

Many may still be unconvinced, so let me put a different situation forward. Money is a pretty easy-to-come-by thing. You work, you get money. If you have a money problem you can guarantee that you can somehow resolve it with hard work. Take the money problem away completely and as humans, we find other things to be discontent about. It's completely natural. That's why lottery winners make ridiculous dirt bike tracks in their new palatial gardens. And the issue is: relationships with other people and with yourself are much more complex and there are no simple solutions most of the time.

In short I think that people who have to think about money are far better off than those who don't. Life is simpler. Life is engaging and challenging and everything it should be. And without stating the obvious, I'm not talking about those living on or below the bread line because money isn't what these people strive for; food, clean water and basic medicines are what they need. When I say "money", I mean anything left over after the essential life ingredients.

Obviously this is a general statement and does not include the truly remarkable individuals who can work wonders for charity and so on. Nor does it include the distinctly lazy, unremarkable portion of society who don't step up to the challenge and enjoy life for what it is.

Post 3. A Whole Load of Hot Air

Climate Change. Is it something to worry about?

This article is about the report ran in 2007 by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Apparently, 3 years after its release, someone, somewhere has decided that there's some dodgy or incorrectly cited information stating that by 2035, the Himalayan glaciers will have completely melted away. Now this topic has really got me going.

There are two clear cut, completely separate issues here, and I think they have both been mixed up by every journalist, news reporter and his dog. So allow me to clarify the situation for you as I see it.

As stated above, the IPCC issued a 3000 page report threatening some alarming consequences to our current lifestyles. The pro-Earth lot are all saying the end is nigh, we must all act now. Whereas the skeptics have found somewhere within this massive report some dodgily sourced data to back up some pretty extreme eventualities and have challenged the reliability of the data.

Like I said above, there are two different aspects to this and they both seem to have been confused somewhere along the line:

• 1. Good scientific practice and research,

• 2. All established ideas on climate change.

Firstly, let me acquaint you with the way the scientific community works and builds up their understanding of everything. 

• You start with what you already know

The convention is that every bit of knowledge and understanding we have is built upon knowledge we already had. Any scientific work has to be examined by the relevant community (ie. the Geological Society), they then either accept this work and buy into your hypothesis. This then turns into a theory. Theories are widely accepted as a possible cause for something and can then be used as a basis for more research, to which more hypotheses become theories. It's sort of like a tree, you start from one point and you branch out until you understand everything. That make sense?

•  Any assumptions you make must come from previous work

What happens when you're doing any research is you're either testing existing theories against your own data or testing your data to see if it fits the theory. Any models you use must come from existing theory. For example, there is an accepted paper stating "all dry valleys with no evidence of river action are glacial". If you then find an exception to this, you have disproved the theory. Or you could collect loads of data and find that actually, this model is correct, in which case, you have clarified the process which created your particular valley. Do you still follow?


As for the report by the IPCC, it seems that somewhere along the line there has been some second hand data that they've used which was not published or recognized. The result is that the skeptics have picked up on this, using it to bring the IPCC into disrepute. What the media have done is confused this small piece of bad science with the wider issue of whether climate change is actually happening. We need to bare in mind that all previous studies (and for that matter, the majority of the IPCC report) have been based on well grounded, unbiased science and been conducted in the appropriate manner.


So according to all the accepted research, global warming is happening. Just because someone took a careless shortcut in one report doesn't falsify everything that came before it and shouldn't change the public's opinion on the issue.


The hypocrisy of it all is what gets me. When was the last time you saw a newspaper correctly cite and reference every "fact" they published? How often do we just take what is written or said in the media as fact? Let's face it, the newspapers will drag up any old rubbish (accepted or not) if it will make a story to sell newspapers.

The issue here isn't whether climate change is happening, because science is telling us that it is. The issue is that the media (who never tell you where they get their facts from, anyway), tells us they don't quite believe the science. I know who I'd rather believe!


That makes me feel far better. Thanks for reading my first article on a really hot topic!

Post 2. Thoughts on the Blue People

Now, unless you've been living in a misty peatbog feeding on small animals, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

Avatar has recently overtaken Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time, all in something like three or four weeks! For those of us who don't remember the film Titanic (apologies to those who do), it wasn't the best cinema experience or storyline in the world. Nor would I say it had much of a wide appeal (bare with me, I'm trying to draw up some parallels). Dispite this, it still raked in $1.843billion at the box office. To put that into some universal unit, today, it would buy you a private island of 36,000 acres, a one way ticket and 100,000 Mars Bars per day for the next one hundred years. In brief, you would be rather tubby, but probably happy.

The release of Avatar didn't exactly excite me, nor do many films about tall, blue aliens. The only reason I went to see it was because a friend asked me to go and I couldn't think of a good enough reason not to. It wasn't a motivated effort.

As you may have sensed, I have a few issues with the film. The storyline was quite drab. We've seen it all before in other films of a higher quality. For example, Pocahontas (and if you actually look at the story of the two films, there's very little difference). At least Disney give you a few cheesy songs to bite into (we all secretly love them). My second issue is the graphics. The way I see it, either a film has good special effects or it has a good storyline. You seldom see a film with both, just as it's unlikely you'll see a film in the cinema with neither a good story nor good computer graphics (they go straight to dvd). Dispite all the ravings about Avatar being filmed with special cameras and it taking hundreds of years to perfect and so forth, I wasn't impressed. For me, it still felt like I was playing The Smurfs on my old PS2.

So, to draw up my prarallels between Titanic and Avatar, neither had a particularly meaty story to them and I found neither of them all too easy on the eye, either. Yet these two films grossed the highest box office incomes of all the films, ever.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the publics' expectations of a film are far more important than the film itself. This must be down to pre-release promotions. Many a time I went to surf the internet on - just some of my favourite sites - for example SkySports. For those who don't use SkySports often, it has nothing to do with cinema. It has nothing to do with blue aliens. In spite of this, I was confronted with one of those annoying adverts that make sound and pop up, covering your web page with graphics completely unrelated to what I intended on looking at (which was how many goals my beloved Liverpool had lost by this week). The advert was for Avatar. This violation of one of my sacred places (many won't understand that sport is something that shouldn't be messed with) annoyed me more than intrigued me, and as a human being, I would always relate the thought of the new film to inconvenience and annoyance. Many people's first impressions of Avatar won't be based on critics' reviews, but of adverts intended on inticing the punter into shelling out to be part of the ultimate experience. Everyone will have gone to watch the film based on a bunch of snippets intedted to lure them in. Although I don't personally remember (i was 9 years old), I'm sure Titanic would have done the same thing to people.


In conclusion, I think what I'm really trying to say on a more general note is that we can't really know if we're watching a good film or not until you leave the theatre and either feel inspired, genuinely inspired, or conned and foolish. The only thing I have to say about this is that it's just a part of the fabric of life. We are unimpressed sometimes, and others we are blown off our feet. What fun would anything be if we knew what was going to come next?

Post 1. Lilly's First Week

I know, I know. You're thinking "this is supposed to be a blog about everything, not you and your new pet", but I can't help it. You have to see her! She's a West Highland Terrier and she's the smallest thing I've ever seen! Here, look for yourself! She's called Lilly, although there's a bit of controversy over the spelling of her name. I'm going for L i l l y. Anyway, I just had to start with that. So, for the first post. I've tried doing this blogging thing before but have never stuck to it, so hopefully this time I will. My first review of this new blog will have to be about one of the tools which will make this blogging thing a whole lot easier, my new BlackBerry Curve 8520.

It really is a remarkable machine. Although I've never had an iPhone, I could easily say with confidence that the BlackBerry is the most compatible and user friendly of the mobile phone world. The messenger service is really a nice touch as it gives you a sense of community within the Blackberry owners' circle. For the record, mine's in white.

The key thing here is that you can assign any email account to your inbox and also very handily assign more than one without having to be some sort of technical guru (which I am most certainly not). This comes in really useful in keeping me organized and in touch for my uni work.

You can plug in any normal headphones you want, which is an issue I have with most other phones. I don't like wearing the "specially made" Sony Erricson hands free, rubbery mess of a pair of headphones I had to if I wanted to listen to anything on my old phone. Coupling the flexibility of this with the media player which is just as diverse as the iPod - and can run in the background while you do any number of other things - makes it just as multi-faceted as any iPhone could be.

Don't get me wrong, I like the way Apple do things. Their emphasis is on style, simplicity and real life; which I like. A lot! Their whole iFamily of products is really impressive, and with the new-born iPad on the way, they look to be pushing all the boring, stressed, hard working Microsoft machines out of the way, something they have been threatening to do for a long while. On the other hand, the vast majority of people are likely to be priced out of these uber-cool gadgets for a long time to come.

Anyway, back to BlackBerry. I find the 8520 to be such an easy to use, organized, and well tempered machine that I think I'm better sending it in to do my exams for me (it'll remember a whole lot more than I will!). It automatically connects your facebook to everything: your calendar (showing people's birthdays), your contacts list and everything else I've not had chance to explore yet.

The camera is pretty good and the speed at which you can take a picture and have it sent to someone, via email, mms, facebook or any other way you can imagine is really quite amazing. Actually, as an example, the picture above was taken on Barry (the name I've assigned for my phone- BarryBerry). I took it and sent it to a few people via different methods and it went off without a hitch.

Another thing about the BlackBerry that's impressed me is the way you can organise your menu in whatever way you want. Stick a folder here, move an application there, put applications in folders, then move the folders. I think you get the point.

Ohh, and before I forget. A BlackBerry is also a telephone. That's right, this thing does all a telephone does too! Sometimes it's easy to forget as this thing does that much you might as well be sat at a computer. You seem surprised!

Finally, there are a multitude of (free and paid) applications you can download and automatically update when one comes available. And the array of cases, skins, wallets, leather pouches, socks, screen protectors and all that is enormous, absolutely enormous. Barry could have several ch-ch-ch-ch-changes of space-suit if he wanted and they aren't all that expensive and really easy to take off and put on.

All in all, I think my message is GET ONE!

Thanks for reading and I'll be back as soon as I think of something else to blog about. Actually, I'm always here with the help of my trusty steed (BlackBerry), but you know what I mean.

For now.