Easter Exaggeration (well actually it's a lie)

"Four out of five British adults believe in the power of prayer," according to a post on the Church of England's website yesterday (many thanks to Jenny Barlow for pointing me towards this "statistic") which references a new "ICM survey in the run-up to Easter".

Well, it's not just that I've a tendency to critically examine all sorts of claims and try to find out what they're based on, but I don't know four OR five people with any sort of religious inclination.
It doesn't even take much digging to read that the survey in question doesn't actually ask whether people believe in the power of prayer, or anything remotely similar, but instead has the question:

"Irrespective of whether you currently pray or not, if you were to pray for something at the moment, What would it be for?"

So, as 19% of respondents responded with "don't know" or said they would "never pray for anything", the C of E spin doctors contemptuously ignore the old "Thou shalt not bear false witness" commandment, and miraculously interpret this to mean that the remainder must believe that there's some sort of celestial concierge who responds to pestering (the website quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury as saying "...committed in prayer to Christ, and we will see a world transformed.").

However, as the Church article helpfully informs us that 31% of respondents said they would pray for world peace, and as there obviously isn't anything like "world peace", either nobody has got around to praying yet, God has so far ignored all the prayers but might do something about it later, or praying is a pointless exercise.

Maybe the C of E will add a request for clarification into its Pray One For Me programme of getting requests relayed through church groups?

More Money Matters, But No More Money?

So, just a few days after Harriet Harman had said (sort of - see last post!) that her Labour colleagues on Newcastle City Council were definitely not cutting their arts budget by 100%, the councillors have come up with some money after all.

Or have they?
In a miraculous feat of prestidigitation, £600,000 has "appeared" out of some sort of magic hat to replace the £1.2 million arts subsidy.

Or has it?
Closer inspection of this "fund" shows that nothing will happen before 2016, and that some of the total figure is coming from hoped-for private donations (council leader has called for "very wealthy" Geordie celebrities like Sting to contribute), some from as-yet-unsolicited business largesse, and whatever they can get from selling the Lord Mayor's 18th century coach.

So for now,  the arts are still getting a 100% cut, none of the libraries scheduled with closure are actually reprieved, and up in Newcastle the only art with a future is performing sleight of hand....

Money Matters

News in this week's Guardian on-line includes a piece about Newcastle City Council deciding to cut its Arts budget by 100 per cent.
This has been publicly backed by the shadow culture minister, Dan Jarvis, but criticised by many including the writer Lee Hall who said 'if as the shadow culture minister you cannot robustly and publicly defend the right of working-class and disadvantaged people to have access to libraries and culture, I do not understand what you are doing holding that brief'.

This little mess has prompted his boss, shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman, to deliver some damage limitation, but not in a way that stands up any sort of scrutiny. ‘There is not going to be a 100 per cent cut to the arts in Newcastle,’ she told The Guardian. ‘Across the board, they will be supporting the arts. I can’t give you the nitty-gritty . . .’
 
The facts, she means.
Actual, hard figures.
Finite numbers or information on where the funding will come from?
Anything at all that we can judge or evaluate?
Nope. Just some glib well-spun messages and the odd soundbite.

Maybe the plan is to leave one of those funny little notes for the next council leader telling him the money has run out so he can put it in a frame and ask the Arts Council if he can have a grant for it?

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...

Not Barking (mad) up the Wrong Tree

Nice to read in this morning's paper that the House of Lords has at last voted to remove a law criminalising the use of insulting language in Britain.

Although it'll be early next year before MPs are asked to finally decide on the Lord's amendment, the decision is long overdue as it follows a long series of headline-grabbing arrests and prosecutions ranging from an Oxford student asking a police officer if his horse was gay (Thames Valley police described it as homophobic and "offensive to people passing by"), to a Newcastle teenager getting fined £50 with £150 costs for saying "woof" to two labradors.

Not only does this mean that atheist pensioner John Richards will be able to put up a sign in his window saying "religions are fairy stories for adults" without the threat of arrest by the local Lincolnshire constabulary for "causing alarm and distress", I can now go out and say boo to next door's goose and keep my CRB status intact ..