May 15th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
Like anybody else she is innocent until proven guilty – a cornerstone of our justice system that her newspapers and other similar papers seem to forget.
The way I see it, either she did it in which case she deserves everything she gets, or she didn’t, in which case she might think back to how she has treated the presumption of innocence in the past. Anybody arrested in connection with a high-profile murder or child kidnapping seems to be all over the front pages with lots of dirt dished, before they are released without charge. In a way I kind of hope she is innocent so that she will get a taste of how all that feels.
Bit uncharitable of her old man to call it a witch hunt, but I suppose he knows her best.
Tags: Newspapers
May 11th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Politics
Tonight was Crawley Labour’s constituency meeting and, unsurprisingly, the mood was good. I enjoyed congratulating Peter Smith, Colin Moffatt and Chris Mullins on winning their seats and others for holding onto theirs. There was also a new leader of the Labour group to congratulate. [Read more →]
Tags: Elections·Statistics
May 10th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Politics
The local elections here in Crawley turned out pretty well for Labour I think. We held all the seats we were defending and took three off the Tories, unseating one of their cabinet members in the process. We came pretty close in our other target seat and looking at the results we did well enough in Three Bridges that it should become a target seat now.
We now have a situation where there are 5 split wards which have both Tory and Labour councillors. Four of them were, I think, recently all-Tory wards and all of them have had Labour wins as their most recent result. We only need to gain three of them to regain control of the council. [Read more →]
Tags: Crawley Council·Elections
May 9th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
I just finished reading Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan. It was another advance proof copy (and we all now how much I love reading advance proof copies) from Amazon’s Vine programme. For a change this is one I probably would have bought if I had seen it on sale: how could I resist such a title and the promise of zombie livestock? Also irresistable was the tagline of “forget the cud, they want blood”.
Also for a change, I regretted having a proof copy because it only has placeholders where the foreword, acknowledgements and author biography would be and as soon as I finished I wanted to find out a bit more about the author, specifically whether he has written any other books. (It turns out he hasn’t yet)
Anyway, here is what I wrote about it: [Read more →]
Tags: Books·Reviews·Vine
May 6th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
Well – the WordPress plugin which was cross-posting stuff to Facebook stopped working. Apparently it was withdrawn by the author. I found an alternative (WPBook Lite foranybody who is interested) which seems to work but involves creating an app on Facebook. All a bit complicated but it looks like it is working OK so I won’t complain. I try not to complain about stuff that is free.
Tags: testing
May 6th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
It appears to have worked, despite me not really understanding what I have done. I’ll count that as a success.
Tags: testing
May 6th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
In the book I just finished reading there was a brief reference to some experiments that Harry Harlow did in the 1950s in America. I had never heard of these experiments before and I had not heard of Harry Harlow before but he sounded like a grade A bastard even by the standards of the time. I decided to look him up on Wikipedia and found this article.
It is very , very depressing reading.
The way I understand it, from the book I was reading, the first chimps were bred for other experiments and Harlow raised them in isolation to try and keep them free of cross-infection but found out that the isolation severaly damaged the chimps emotionally. I think most normal people would have regretted that, but he thought that the emotional damage was interesting in itself and then continued. The results of these experiments have really shed a lot of light on the workings of the human mind, but I don’t think that justifies the nature of them.
Tags: Science
May 2nd, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life, Politics
I recently finished reading a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind -Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and thoroughly enjoyed it even though it was uncomfortable reading at times as it challenged and chipped away at some of my core beliefs. It has the potential to be a life-changing book. That is a bit of a bold statement I know, so I’ll explain later.
It was another book that I got through Amazon’s Vince programme, which I might otherwise have missed out on.
Amazon don’t like the reviews on their site to be overly long so I’ll paste what I wrote there and then expand on it a bit because I can waffle on as much as I like here 
[Read more →]
Tags: Books·Religion·Reviews·Vine
May 1st, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Politics
I may have neglected to mention it, but am a candidate in this year’s council elections so if anybody reading this lives in Maidenbower and fancies annoying the Tories then pop down to the polling station on Thursday and put a big kiss against my name.
Tags: Crawley Council·Elections·Maidenbower
April 26th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life, Work
Wednesday was a bit of a long day. I found myself booked on a one-day course that was
- 100% mandatory
- In Glasgow
And I decided to do it as a day trip. My four colleagues went up Tuesday afternoon, but I figured that since I live right next to the airport it was feasible to do it all in one day. It was, but it made for one long day. [Read more →]
Tags: Scotland·Travel
