Verbal

Funny how when other editors like David Yelland and Andrew Neill resigned from NI, they received nothing. Coulson was secretly in the pay of NI while in the pay of No.10. If some on here can't see anything even vaguely wrong with that they are either so blinkered by grovelling loyalty to 'their' party, or they have mislaid (hopefully temporarily...) the capacity to think straight.

None at all.

Your ability to extrapolate from the totally irrelevant is impressive. We're talking about a gigantic conflict of interest here. Comparing Coulson's move from News International to the office of the guy the media group campaigned to have installed in No 10 to Pardew is staggeringly banal - a kind of po-faced refusal to see the implications and dangers of corruption even when it's in plain sight.

This is why 'gardening leave' is often taken - to avoid even the hint of a conflict of interests. But to have a senior executive from a media group notorious for its manipulation of British politics to be paying large sums to one of their former own while they take up a position in the highest office of the land is deeply corrupt. If Cameron knew about it, which he almost certainly did, he is a party to that corruption.

To be honest, I didn't notice that you'd gone anywhere. But welcome back from rehab anyway.

However complicated and murky this affair gets, the one anchor is that Coulson seems to be at the centre of it all. And this makes Cameron look even worse than I thought was possible.

Are you sure? You're very lucky. That's the only place in the world where Great Whites have learned to leap out of the water - as a whale would - to snatch their prey (seals mostly, rather than beardy blokes, but they're not fussy.) As long as you can see it from safety, the sight of a Great White breaching is staggering.

All this only makes Cortese look even better - and for all the pain the club has been though until ML, we dodged a bullet when Lowe was forced to ditch Clifford.

But they ARE, and they are actually very highly thought of by university admissions tutors Since you quite wrongly told a poster earlier that his daughter was essentially making a mistake by sitting for IB, I'm concerned that you are so determined in your misguided view. It sounds like you have an axe to grind. Do you? Your point, by the way, about numbers taking Pre-U is hard to understand. Regardless of the numbers taking it - because it's relatively new - university admissions tutors know exactly how to do deal with it (a D3 for example being equivalent to a scraped A and an M1 a B, etc)

I'm assuming - or hoping - picture number 1 was taken from a cage. Viewed from there at least, they are truly spectacular beasts. I hope the attacks don't lead people back to thinking that sharks need yet more culling.

I have a lot more to do with UCAS than you might imagine. And again, Ken, you're wrong I'm afraid. The Pre-U isn't for 'weak independent schools'. Among those who offer it are Westminster School, probably the best independent school in London. Your numbers for the IB unfortunately miss out the high numbers of students who sit for this in the EU and overseas. Trust me, any competent university admissions tutor dealing with IB results knows exactly how to assess them. And IBs are, as I've said, better qualifications for certain in-demand subjects than BTEC because the highest you can score in BTEC is only equivalent to AAB, whereas Pre_U and IB scores, for example, go all the way to A*A*A*.

Hang on, aren't you the one who said because you were an engineer you were better than the scientists?

Quite, but the claim that solar activity correlates with global warming has long been debunked. That was the point I was making - not that solar activity has no influence in other ways (obviously it does).

There are many good places to do a PGCE. Oxford University's Education Department is one of the best in the country and has a very large PGCE programme. Frankly it's one of the easiest ways both of getting in, and of having a lovely time at the best (or one of two) university in the country. And you can supplement a bursary with tutorial college teaching - which pays quite well and is all kind of a virtuous circle... Take a look... http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/courses/pgce/

It doesn't need to be. Weather is of little or no interest to scientists concerned with effects on climate. There is a long history of scientific analysis of the relationship (or not, as it turns out) between solar activity and shifts in climate patterns. This whole argument was effectively debunked in the public debate that followed 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' on C4 a few years ago.

Or Hendrix's version at the Isle of wight festival.

And it's a fine way to live. Unfortunately the other lot have run away to run a country.

We live in the most class-conscious country in the world bar possibly India. It matters. Work in the BBC, for example, and it matters. Or the higher echelons of the Civil Service.

Same here. It's all very odd.

I haven't - but I do know the government were recently paying people to do the conversion because of the shortage of maths and science teachers.

Not with the professions VFTT mentioned you can't. If your burning ambition is to do either of those (and a whole host of others) you have to get a long way through the education system.

Living in London, you wouldn't stand a chance on £30,000. And the difference between graduate and non-graduate salaries certainly matters here. My nephew and niece, undergraduates at Oxford and LSE respectively, are on a £1000 a week as interns. They expect to be making at least double or treble that when they graduate. All fine, except that it really feels sometimes like London is a different country to the rest of the UK, and with very high (financial) walls around it that anyone from the outside would struggle to climb.

What does that mean though? I've met someone who said to be the cleverest man alive, Ed Whitten. He's virtually impossible to communicate with, and I'm sure would be rubbish at an awful lot of things. Still a genius. Maybe the only difference is he found a way to deal with it all by becoming a mathematician - probably good that he didn't get his hands on a submarine.

One of the problems of distance learning is that it often attracts people who shouldn't be doing A Levels, who then get cross when they fail. Anyway, given your degree qualifications, I wonder whether you should really be looking at a PGCE and convert to maths or physics that way.

You have to be careful, you're right. ICS have been doing it for decades and frankly have a better reputation than the Oxbridge tutorial colleges. I'd be surprised if they didn't do A-Level Physics, including the lab work.