Last September Ian Christie gave three lectures for Gresham College under the overall title The Worlds of Powell and Pressburger. This is the first of them and the Gresham College site says: When Alexander Korda teamed Michael Powell with Emeric Pressburger in 1939, a lasting partnership between this Englishman and refugee Hungarian must have seemed unlikely. Yet they soon discovered a remarkable bond, pushing each other far beyond what they could do separately, and creating a unique body of filmmaking. This lecture explores how the partnership worked during the 1940s, drawing in collaborators from many backgrounds who also gave of ...
"Liberal England died a century ago and we still haven't learned anything," says Stephen Howse. The title made me choke, but it's a good post and the comments are worth reading too. Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner for competition, is interviewed about Covid-19 and the role of the big tech companies she distrusts. "Economists now study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences, Ramseyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine." Anthony Gottlieb on Frank Ramsey, who died at the age of 26. Rob Young looks ...
As with any podcasts I recommend, these reflect my own rather idiosyncratic tastes. However, boredom is apparently a major contributor to the mental health problems that arise from lockdown and in the difficulties some people have complying with it. And as podcasting is one of the mediums that it easier to produce from your kitchen, [...]
The Children's Commissioner for England has spoken out against the government's reduction of the safeguards for children in care: I appreciate that Local Authority children's services are likely to be experiencing challenging working conditions during the pandemic, and there are many inspiring examples of frontline workers going above and beyond the call of duty to keep children safe. Nevertheless, I do not believe that the changes made in these regulations are necessary- except perhaps for some clarifications (in guidance) about contact with children taking place remotely during the lockdown. Children in care are already vulnerable, and this crisis is placing ...
What kind of transformational changes can we propose to deal with our society's ills, after the health crisis? First of all, a change of attitude is needed. We should demand that our government accept that its duty and purpose is to serve our whole national community and restore its total wellbeing. There should be no more specially privileged groups, whether hedge-fund or Union party donors and no more disadvantaged groups mainly told to fend for themselves. In the post-Brexit Britain of national sovereignty, the government must remember that everyone has a right to share this sovereignty and so all are ...
Currently reading Riverland, by Fran Wilde Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz The Hunt for Vulcan: ...And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, by Thomas Levenson Finished in the last week Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski The Giver, by Lois Lowry Torchwood: World Without End, by John Barrowman, Carole Barrowman, Antonio Fuso and Pasquale Qualano The Heralds of Destruction, by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones The French Connection, by Robin Moore The Long Song, by Andrea Levy April 2020 books Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 21) The Lady ...
You may be doing this already. If so polish your halo and read no further, but less than 5% of the population are doing this so a lot of readers could usefully latch onto it. There's a health tracker which you can put on your mobile phone just to report in once a day to say whether you have had a test for Covid, and whether you're still feeling fit and well. Using it Kings College London and the NHS can help pinpoint how the virus is spreading, helping to predict hotspots and other research. Its very easy to join ...
"A third of Covid-19 hospital patients die". That is the stark headline in the Guardian today, echoed in other media. But shouldn't it read "Two thirds of Covid-19 hospital patients survive"? We rightly applaud the NHS workers at every opportunity, and we do so because they are saving lives. People are only being admitted to hospital with Covid-19 when their lives are at risk. This is a vicious new disease that no-one knew anything about just four months ago, and yet everyone in the NHS, from the whole range of health care professionals to administrators and ancillary workers, are together ...
Like many the lockdown left me searching for things to do in this unique situation. A search on the Film 4 website took me to the complete series of the hit US comedy Seinfeld so I decided to work my way through it knowing that it would make me laugh as it did 25 years ago. Throughout the series there are passing references to sport and politics which got me thinking about both in a somewhat unusual way. Seinfeld is set in New York, a city that lost its iconic baseball team the Brooklyn Dodgers back in the late 1950s ...
Dental emergencies If you have a dental emergency, including severe pain and infection, you can now get treatment in an urgent dental centre, commissioned by NHS England and NHS Improvement. There are 15 in the south west, with one in Bristol and one in Bath. These are fully staffed and equipped to provide treatment while high-street surgeries are closed due to Covid-19. To get access, people should phone their own dentist to be assessed. All NHS dental surgeries should still be contactable. Out of usual surgery hours, people should call NHS 111. Those without a dentist or who cannot get ...
South Gloucestershire Trading Standards Scams and rogue trading updates We would be grateful if you would share this information with your volunteers and encourage them to report anything suspicious. The bulletins are a brief summary of some issues being highlighted by Trading Standards locally and regionally, as well as partners such as Action Fraud and the police. If you have any questions about the information get in touch using the email address trading.standards@southglos.gov.uk.
Poor Nigel Farage. He no longer has a seat in the European Parliament and none of the news outlets want to talk to him because COVID-19 is dominating the agenda. Brexit has been pushed to the backs of people's minds as we struggle with social distancing, a struggling economy, job insecurity and self-isolation. What is a failed politician to do? What Farage did do, was to travel more than 100 miles, in defiance of lockdown regulations, to film a video rant about migrants. A claim by his spokesperson, reported in the Mirror, that he was acting as a broadcaster who ...
Lockdown has produced some interesting and unexpected consequences. The Gateshead Lib Dem Council group has started to go on pub crawls! Well, virtual pub crawls to be precise. Cllr Vicky Anderson set up our first session on Saturday and I bought along a bottle of elderberry vodka I made a couple of years ago. Sadly, I was unable to let others sample it but I'm sure colleagues appreciated my
Last night I received a phone call from Mayor Anderson that I was pleased to get but horrified to listen to. The immediate cause of the phone and new information to me is that Council had received just £13 million ... Continue reading →
There's a great tool available from Google - Postmaster Tools - which helps crack a key but often overlooked aspect of email campaigning: deliverability.
Wed, 12:02: Total Belgian COVID-19 cases in hospital now 4050, total in ICU 797 - both below 28 March levels (4089/867), but st... https://t.co/TZFiCLxmJX Wed, 12:17: RT @BigStealPodcast: In the final episode of #BigStealPodcast we bring together all the threads of our series, mark the latest chapter in t... Wed, 12:56: RT @bigfinish: THIS FRIDAY! 7pm (UK time) it's the first Big Finish #DoctorWho listening party, with @shearmanrobert and @indfisher! 🕯️ FIN... Wed, 13:50: RT @EU_Commission: We have mobilised €3.3 billion to support the Western Balkans in dealing with the #coronavirus crisis. This will addres... Wed, 14:36: RT @emmawage: Calling ...
More entertaining education from Tom Scott as he dives into why a seemingly innocuous road junction – Ipley Cross, in the middle of the New Forest – is such a problem for cycling safety:
Thu 30th
10:50
Should we be taking population density into account when comparing countries on Covid-19?
May I first offer my sincere sympathy to all those who have been directly affected by Covid-19 through their own illness or through loss or illness of loved ones. This is a truly terrible illness and my heart goes out to all those who have suffered, as well as the many NHS, care and key workers who have put their life on the line to help others. One of the horrible sides of the pandemic is that it is often reduced to slides of statistics. When reducing thousands of individual tragedies of people's lives cut cruelly short to graphs, it ...
Some might immediately dispute my headline. "We got six million people to sign a revoke petition! There were several marches through London attended by hundreds of thousands of people!" All right, but Brexit happened. Sort of. It's hard not to see a pretty hardcore version of a real Brexit taking place at the end of this year. And really, it all ended in December when the Tories were given a very large parliamentary majority by the British electorate. To reverse quote the Corbynistas, FBPE lost the argument. What went wrong? There are several ways to approach this question. You could ...
In the wake of coronavirus, how should Liberal Democrats think about and approach capitalism? For those on the left this pandemic is confirmation that capitalism has failed; without significant state assistance it lacks, we are told, the resilience to manage in times of crisis. As a result, socialists declare that the market must be restrained, tempered, and tamed. Crucially, however, it is the state which is to be charged with achieving this. We must, we are told, have more taxation and greater regulation as well as greater state spending. In contrast, for those on the right this episode has confirmed ...
Sign up here to get a free chapter from my book, Bad News. It's the one all about how the media repeatedly gets its coverage wrong at campaign time.
2 big stories So, will Matt Hancock reach his target of 100,000 tests today? And even if that capacity is reached, will they be carried out? It's not looking terribly optimistic when even NHS Providers, which represents foundation trusts in England, dismisses the 100,000 target as a "red herring" that distracted from the failures of ministers. Setting targets and missing them is bad enough, but setting meaningless, and possibly even misdirected ones, and msssing them anyway, seems to be the story of this Government's handling of the crisis. It's a sign of the general uselessness of the British print media ...
Rainbows have become a symbol of hope during this challenging time and Dundee City Council would love to share them! 🌈 🌈 It is looking to update the side bar images you see on its website with lots and lots of pictures of your rainbows! Please use the #DundeeRainbows hashtag on Facebook or Twitter with them! 🎨
