Weigh to go

Many of us who prefer to quote scientific data instead of diet or exercise to feel fitter have yet another reason to rejoice today as we've now got a much healthier body mass index without doing anything at all.

This is due to the formula we've been using to calculate body fat getting declared faulty by a University of Oxford Professor of Numerical Analysis. Nick Trefethen says that the original formula devised by Adolphe Quetelet in the 1830s underestimates how much broader tall people are on average. Trefethen's adjustment means that tall people (e.g six footers like me) who were previously misled into thinking they were fatter than they were are now thinner, but conversely what were up to yesterday short, normal people now count as overweight.

As Newton said, for every action, there's an an equal and opposite reaction.
Science eh?
Much better than exercise...

Parrot Fashion Disaster

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced that teenagers will now be encouraged to learn, by heart, some of the 130 poems in a new anthology for a nationwide competition. Parrot fashion we called it at school. Not an enlightening way for a young mind to learn anything because they end up with as much understanding of Chaucer, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Hardy as, well, parrots.

Gove claims that this "policy" is intended to help "pass our cultural legacy on to the next generation", but in reality it'll only mean that our literature education regressing to the days of fold-up desks, ink wells, chalk boards and clips around the ear; but as most of our older generation remain utterly clueless when it comes to Shakespearean language or the works of Shelley, it obviously didn't work back then either. Does he not have any advisors who care (know?) about education enough to tell him that this is an ill-considered substitute for teaching, and that learning poetry, or pretty much any subject worth studying, is more to do with developing an understanding, not memorising by rote?

What next for the self-interested point scorers who want to take us back to some mythical golden age of education? Returning imperial measurements to the classroom alongside metric because that’s the way it was when everybody had rickets?

Oh dear.
Apparently that's already another "policy" with no obvious benefit to future of the nation....

Post-Christmas Post

Today's BBC website carries the news that scientists have discovered that the original kilogram, the standard by which all weight is measured, has become slightly heavier since it was cast from platinum-iridium in France 137 years ago. This is apparently due to small amounts of pollution collecting on its surface, and as a result, everything else has become lighter, including us.

As Peter Cumpson, professor of MicroElectroMechanical systems at Newcastle University, puts it "It is a really tiny effect, but strictly speaking we are all slightly lighter than we were in the late 1800s."
This means that I'm now sat in a Belfast hotel room weighing less than I thought I did when I left home, even though my weight has stayed exactly the same.

Not only that, but as the distance in kilometres between here and home is based on the speed of light, which is derived from how fast light might travel between two fixed points even though Albert Einstein declared that there were no fixed points, I'm now convincing myself that post-Christmas gym exertions aren't worth the effort. After all, if each walk down the drive is actually a slightly further distance travelled, but in the same amount of time as before, surely I must have got faster as well as lighter?

Just need someone to sort Time out and I can convince myself that I'm getting younger as well...