Food for thought

Sat on the train home from today's HN Examiner meeting, I've just read in the free paper handed to me at King's Cross this little gem from a recently published collection of the Queen Mother's letters about some South Sea Island:

"The natives are very diseased and are rapidly dying out.  Instead of being strong, healthy cannibals with strange religions and no clothes, they are now half-hearted Roman Catholics, with European clothes.  It seems all wrong but that is what happens."

David Icke probably takes this as confirmation that the QM was indeed a blood-drinking lizard keen on human flesh, but is it an example of anti-Catholic prejudice or an indication that the royal family have a progressive appreciation of cultural diversity just as long as the natives aren't eating anybody you might know?

Never mind the quality mark, feel the myth

Sitting on a train on the way home, I've been reading the TES on-line where one of the headline stories is about the Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm (which somewhat coincidently is located near Bristol which is where I've been for a JISC meeting,) controversially receiving the Government-backed Council for Learning Outside the Classroom's “quality badge”, a kitemark developed last year to accredit outdoor activity centres, museums and stately homes as suitable for children's education.

Hopefully the institution's name ought to be a clue for any educators wanting to broaden the mind of their charges, but the presence of an official badge might sway the unwary into inadvertently exposing enquiring minds to religious propaganda presented as fact.

Now leaving aside problems which are presumably issues of faith, such as where did all the water come from and where did it go, or why did Noah leave all the marsupials in Australasia, the likelihood of the story having any actual, and therefore significant, educational basis can be illustrated with simple mathematics.

Ignoring what we actually know to be the highest peaks on earth (Everest, K2, etc) and instead using Mount Ararat as reference point since that's where the biblical story says the ark ended up, we're left with water covering land at an elevation above sea level of to close to 17000 feet (to be precise the elevation of said mountain is 16945 feet). Since the story says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, that means in each twenty four hour period the water rose an average of 425 feet (17000/40), or to put it in another way, 17' 9" each and every hour all around the world for nearly 6 weeks, not just local to wherever Noah's menagerie was floating around.

That's an awful lot of water in anybody's (good?) book, and if the family who run the zoo want to believe that it really happened and put on a show about it then that's up to them, but handing out an official educational endorsement is surely not something that's going to help anybody involved in the planning of school trips now that we know there's no apparent care taken in deciding which organisations can be trusted to deliver objective supplements to the national curriculum.

Springing in the rain

Trying to drive back up the M1 after attending a JISC Project Assembly, I'm now parked in Leicester Forest service station due to the torrential rain which the local Midlands radio describes as "unseasonal".
As today is officially three days into spring, "unseasonal" would appear to be putting it rather mildly.
Unlike the weather, which isn't mild at all.....

Effectively it's a secret?

Surfing the Internet whilst on the way home after delivering a day's training about running effective meetings in Manchester isn't yielding any information about yesterday's HEFCE meeting to decide this year's funding allocations.
Thinking aloud - is this because:

• no decision has been made yet? And if not why not?
• they're waiting to tell the institutions/organisations first? Which means it's not looking good for the support providers.
• or maybe they'd also like some help running effective meetings?

Note: today's staff development hasn't been specifically "Running Effective Meetings in Manchester", it just happens to have been in Manchester as that's where the client's based...