Halo Stickman

Okay, I’m on neither one side nor the other concerning the man-made global warming debate; however, I would genuinely appreciate some help with – or opinions on – the following: I often read temperatures quoted to more than one decimal place; today, for example, I read on Wikipedia a figure from NASA Data quoting the “combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly” for the years 1880 – 1889 as being minus 0.274˚C compared to the 1951 – 1980 mean. Have world temperatures always been measured to 3 decimal places of a ˚C, even in the 1880s, or do these (seemingly) very precise figures occur as a result of averaging? If it’s the latter, I was always taught that precision (or accuracy) cannot be introduced as a result of averaging, and that an averaged result should never be quoted in significant figures exceeding those of the measured data, e.g. if I measure the temperature in my garden every day for a week as 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10 and 9, then I can only quote the average daily temperature as 10 and not as 9.857 (69 divided by 7) What am I missing here?

In the hypothetical scenario whereby Britain and France don’t declare war on Germany following their invasion of Poland, thus encouraging Germany to invade Russia a year earlier than they actually did, then, for the reasons already stated by CEC, my best guess would be that this invasion would have been successful. It would almost certainly have not been opposed by any of the other western powers because for most people, especially the governing powers of that era, Communism was seen as a greater threat than Nazism. Of course, Pap is right to say that the vast country of Russia with its huge population would never be entirely subjugated; yet this was, I think, something that Hilter not only envisaged, but also welcomed. In his world-view he imagined an area of perpetual military strife, far away from Germany, where young Germans could be honed in the art of warfare – a rights of passage sort of thing. He also saw plenty of opportunities in such an area for ‘undesirables’ displaced from an ever-expanding greater Germany. Much of what happens next would likely depend on which country won the race to build the atomic bomb.

Terrorism, especially violent terrorism against innocent individuals, is rarely successful in bringing about change; in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is counter productive. “It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still part of the UK, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rica, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt and Uzbekistan are not Islamic theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias.” – Steven Pinker 2011 The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes

Things are not always black and white when it comes to race: “I don’t go as so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.” – Theodore Roosevelt, USA President and Nobel Peace laureate

The book, Hitler’s Table Talk, is a collection of Hitler’s views gathered by his private secretary, Martin Borman, and others, from conversations and monologues Hilter gave to his inner-circle. It’s some years since I read it, but if my memory serves me correctly, Hilter’s world view, prior to WWII, was for Germany to control an expanded mainland Europe and Britain to maintain its oversees’ empire. These 2 great super-powers would then keep America in check, whilst all would unite to annihilate communism. I can’t recall whether or not Hilter expected Britain to actively co-operate with plans for his other ‘sub-human undesirables’. It’s interesting to speculate on a post-1940 world without, for example, the Soviet Bloc countries and Israel.

Ever since the dawn of time – or was it the dawn of man, or the dawn of religion, or the dawn of the Enlightenment, or the dawn of whatever – people have sat astride their metaphorical high horse claiming the metaphorical moral high ground; often whilst impaling their opponents on spikes, burning them on stakes, blowing them up with bombs, or by taking their lives, or liberty, in some other more ‘civilised’ way. SW forum members, terrorists, freedom fighters, apartheid governments, non-apartheid governments, law-makers, law-changers, we all have different morals; but who decides where the moral high ground lies? Don't we all just choose its whereabouts to suit ourselves and our circumstances at any given time? RIP Mandela and all the innocent victims of apartheid and of terrorism

As if the Villa result wasn’t bad enough, poor Carbs drops a sitter

On a visit to Havana in 2004 a bloke presented me with a portrait he’d scribbled of me. I hadn’t asked him to, and it wasn’t very good, but I gave him a dollar regardless. This turned out to be a big mistake: I spent the next 2 hours surrounded by numerous furiously scribbling ‘street artists’, and couldn’t see any of the sights. The tour guide told me that a dollar represented roughly the weekly wage in Cuba. I’ve no idea if she was telling the truth; it did, however, seem to be a lot of money to them. Sorry, this adds nothing to the Socialism v Capitalism debate – I just wanted to show off that I’ve been to Cuba and what a generous man I am.

Why yes, Tim – people just die for an invite to my funeral parties.

… or as our old friend Willy Shakespeare (or perhaps it was a bunch of other blokes purporting to be WS ) once said: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Thanks for posting that link, Pap. People like Halpin and Baker are obviously passionate in their belief that Dr Kelly didn’t commit suicide, but isn’t passion sometimes problematic? Isn’t it the case that the more passionate we are about something, the less objective and impartial we’re likely to be? And the more time, money and effort we invest in our passion, the less objective and impartial we become. For example, like the overwhelming majority on this forum I am a passionate Saints’ supporter. If I read that an inquiry had found that Portsmouth had better supporters than Saints, I would immediately think that can’t be right and protest about it. Perhaps I’d feel so passionate about it that I would take a year out and spend lots of my own money writing a book entitled Saints Have Better Supporters Than Portsmouth. During the research, I would seek out all the examples that showed that Saints had the better supporters, whilst ignoring anything to the contrary. But imagine, just imagine, the further into the research I got, the more I started to turn up evidence that Portsmouth did indeed have better supporters – I know, I know, it’s repugnant to even imagine such a thing! But suppose that did happen, how likely is it that I would change my views and alter the title to Portsmouth Have Better Supporters Than Saints? Not only is it unlikely, it just would never happen! But, hey Pap, I’ve just subjected us to that horrible thought experiment without even reading Baker’s book! Perhaps he’s objective and impartial throughout, and it is me that is displaying a lack of objectivity and impartiality. I’ll try to find some time to read it and let you know what I think.

A couple of years ago whilst travelling on a train to watch Somerset play Hampshire in the county championship I noticed that the chap sat next to me was reading some papers on Dr David Kelly. We got talking and it transpired that his name was Dr David Halpin, a retired surgeon and one of six doctors who had pressed for a reopening of the inquest into Kelly’s death. He seemed like a genuine chap and was certainly passionate in his belief that Kelly had not committed suicide. He told me how his colleagues had had to give up the fight (because of health and financial reasons) for a reopening of the inquest, but that he was determined to continue his struggle for the truth to be told. As I departed the train at Taunton I promised to look at his website. After a glorious summer’s day watching Adams and Carberry putting the Somerset bowlers to the sword, I fulfilled my promise and visited his website, where I saw that he had a history of fighting causes, which included chartering a Brixham trawler to sail medical and food supplies to the Palestinians in 2003. Part of me thought: how wonderful it is that people are prepared to fight so hard for something they believe in; but another, perhaps more cynical, part of me thought: isn’t this just an example of people, especially retired, previously very active people, needing to find a cause to fight in order to justify their existence – a raison d’etre, if you like? Just like everyone else, I can never be absolutely certain as to how Dr Kelly met his death, but something David Halpin said to me on that train stuck in my mind ever since: “With all the deadly materials Dr Kelly had easy access to, there’s no way I will ever believe he would choose to kill himself by taking a few tablets and slitting his wrists with a blunt penknife.” Yes, perhaps, that does sound bizarre, just like the death (accidental or deliberate) of the M15 agent in the bag sounds bizarre; but couldn’t it be the case that these deaths only seem bizarre to people that are neither in a suicidal frame of mind nor engaging in some form of masochistic sexual behaviour (hadn’t the M15 agent on a previous occasion padlocked himself naked to his bed)? Couldn’t it be the case that these strange deaths seem so bizarre to us that we tend to turn to conspiracy theories in order to get our heads around them? I’m not ruling out more sinister explanations entirely, I’m just positing a more mundane theory.

My sister worked in an A & E department; she too can cite plenty of examples of patients with weird things inserted in strange places; and some of the explanations as to how they got there are truly hilarious – my favourite being an old chap with a carrot up his backside who insisted he had slipped over whilst working on his allotment.

Spot on. With the festive season fast approaching and the colder weather on its way, why not buy the little woman in your life a nice pair of gloves: Poundland have some cracking oven and washing-up varieties – or how about a lovely set of disposables for all those dirty jobs that need doing, whilst you’ve got your feet up in front of the telly. She’ll love them!

If for some reason the noise is being caused by vibrating pipes knocking against something, there’s a chance that sooner or later one of the pipe joints will crack and you’re end up – as I did a few months ago – with water pouring through your ceiling.

Yes, Pap, I tend to agree with you on this. For me the first series with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Darren Day, Rhona Cameron and Nigel Benn in full melt-down mode made good TV; the following series have been dull in comparison – although I have to confess to putting that immensely irritating Gillian McKeith’s bush tucker trial number on speed dial one year.

This! Although the problem could be within the plug, my bet would be that the fault lies with the cable, probably where it connects to the iron. Much better to dump the iron and buy a new one than to risk you or Mrs CS getting an electric shock – I bought a perfectly decent one from Sainsbury’s a few months ago for under a tenner

You may have air in the system; have you tried bleeding the radiators?

I’m quite liking the bird off Eastenders too… doesn’t pay to be picky at my time of life

Ah yes, Charlie, that hoary old chestnut, namely, the free-will versus determinism debate! We are all simply products of a complex equation involving our genetic inheritance and our environment; free-will is just an illusion, and we have as little choice over our actions as we have over the colour of our eyes. Psychopaths, paedophiles and dysfunctional soldiers have had no control over their destinies; they have simply been determined by genetic and environmental forces outside of their control. Is it then justifiable to imprison them for crimes they were almost bound to commit? Well, on the basis that psychopaths and paedophiles are a danger to innocent members of society, I would say yes. But can the same yardstick honestly be used for soldier A?

Do you think a paedophile raping a child is less of a crime then? It’s all very well accusing him of “committing premeditated murder in a cold methodical matter of fact way”, but weren’t, for instance, the WWII aircrews acting in a premeditated cold methodical matter-of-fact way when they dropped their bombs on the innocent citizens of Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima et al? Were they murderers? Yes, soldier A defied his training, breached the Geneva Convention, and has to be punished. But to bracket his crime alongside those of paedophiles or of someone who murders (say) an innocent member of the public is, in my opinion, extremely unfair. War by its very nature is an extremely horrible, messy business, and one of its main aims is to kill people. Whilst it’s right and proper that combatants adhere to such things as the Geneva Convention, unfortunately, such niceties often become little more than semantics . For example, Viking Warrier mentions an incident that occurred in the Falklands War; I recall a similar incident in the same conflict where an Argentine soldier was disembowelled by his own explosives, set alight, but remained fully conscious and in terrible pain. As an act of mercy, to end his suffering, a British officer shot him dead. The British officer’s action was fully endorsed and indeed praised by the Argentine’s commanding officer. However, as I recall (please someone correct me if I’m wrong) this incident occurred when the British ordered the Argentine prisoners-of-war to move their defective explosives away from a civilian building. I believe this order may have breached the Geneva Convention, but, as far as I’m aware, no one was ever prosecuted for this breach. Like I say, I may be wrong with some of the details concerning the above but the point I’m trying to make is that people often play fast and loose with such things as the Geneva Convention: I suspect that if everyone who breached these conventions in wartime was prosecuted, prisons would be fairly full. I’m not saying its right; I’m simply saying sadly that’s often how it is. The only sure fire way to prevent incidents such as that of soldier A is to find a way to avoid fighting wars in the first place

It may well be the case that soldier A acted "not in the heat of battle but in a cold methodical matter of fact way"; however, you must know as well as I do that soldier A’s state of mind on that day could well have been forged by the heat and stresses of previous combat experiences. A soldier can be highly trained to act in a particular way, but nobody can predict how an individual will react to horrific incidents that occur in wartime, especially when one horrific experience is insidiously piled on top of another. There are plenty of well documented cases where soldiers under great duress have carried on performing their duties in the exemplary manner to which they’ve been trained, only to crack and act completely out of character years later – often long after they’ve left the forces. This has long been a sad legacy of war, and whilst nobody should be handed a medal for behaving as soldier A did, equally, in my opinion, nobody, without walking a mile in his shoes, should be advocating he be locked away for life – nor, indeed, for any prison term commensurate with those handed out to the necrophiles, paedophiles, and committers of bestiality that you mentioned in one of your previous replies

What are you on about? Nobody’s advocating anarchy or condoning the actions of soldier A; however, when governments send young men to fight in bl00dy dirty wars it’s naive to expect every one of those soldiers, in the heat and stresses of combat, to adhere to the moral high ground of the cosy armchair generals.

Badly wounded enemy combatant is summarily executed by enemy soldier. Firing squads, death camp operatives, carpet bombers and every indiscriminate slaughterer of the innocents must be wringing their hands in shock and horror – not to mention the countless others who have done exactly the same thing as soldier A in probably every military campaign ever fought. Until the happy-clappy day when every protagonist cheerily carries their wounded foe from the killing fields whilst whistling ‘he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’, let’s just carry on deluding ourselves that war is simply a civilising process where the good guy fights battles for hearts and minds whilst the bad guy get punished for war crimes.

‘he does not always present himself as the brightess….’ You can spend all day selectively highlighting the above, any which way you like, accuse me of being ‘over sensitive…to make a point’, or of not reading posts in their entirety, but you’re not going to dissuade me from thinking that you are doing anything other than sneering at his intelligence with that comment. We could waste each others time all day like this, so, how about you just carry on besmirching MLT and I’ll give up reading your bile.