A system that is going to cost £6.2 billion plus “local costs” had better be good. That’s what the NHS compuerisation is supposed to cost. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5118538.stm on 26 June 2006)
Assuming the UK population is 60,609,153 (July 2006 est.) on https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/uk.html and that the mentioned billion is the US billion (thousand million) that makes the cost £102.29 for every person in the UK or £153.22 for every person of working age (16 to 65, based on the same webpage)
I suspect that’s quite a bit more than GP gets for a year’s care. What are we getting for this? Was there seriously some problem with patients’ getting the wrong records? On a scale that would justify this expnditure? Seems more than unlikely to me.
There are plenty of news items about cutbacks in nursing and other staff, of NHS trust hospitals going bankrupt and so on. Could this £153 not be spent on doctors and nurses and paramedics and dentists and ambulance drivers and cleaners and radiographers?
In my GP’s surgery, the problem is getting an appointment – working your way round impenetrable arrangements that change every few weeks. Attempt to find an NHS dentist and even achieving the much-mocked British teeth become a distant dream. For all the complaints about the Health Service, I have yet to hear of anyone whose records have been lost. So what purpose will it serve?
I am probably a lot more computer-oriented as the next person and it’s always good to see jobs in IT. However, if I break my leg, I wont be yelling for a database technician.

Pretty good grin if you have anything to do with web things.
http://www.6footdesign.com/article/web20alizr

BBC’s science and technology site has a new article about how much energy could be saved if we cut down on the energy used by lighting. (That’s lighting, by the way, not lightning.) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5128478.stm

This is clearly true and obviously a laudable aim. There was one argument that completely stumped me though.

“The carbon dioxide produced by generating all of this electricity amounts to 70% of global emissions from passenger vehicles, and is three times more than emissions from aviation, the IEA says.”

So cars and buses produce almost as much CO2 as lighting the entire planet and planes produce a third as much CO2? I think we can probably take for granted that a lot fewer than 33% of the world’s population make many plane journeys. Even those who do are unlikely to be racking up many frequent flyer miles. I also think it would be fair to say that a lot less than 70% of the global population have much access to a vehicle.

Surely this means that carbon emissions could be quickly reduced by targeting the small section of the global population whose use of planes (and passenger transport) must create more carbon per head per year than would be generated by lighting the average third world city?

More use of energy-saving lightbulbs would obviously be a good idea, but their cost would have to come down a lot before most people could see them as a viable alternative to the uber-cheap wasteful lightbulbs that we usually use. Limiting plane journeys would be easier, giving a quick savinng for little action.

Unless, of course, poor people don’t have the same global shout as the very wealthy (or even the moderately wealthy who can afford a week in Spain twice a year.) Which couldn’t be true.

The previous blog was based on a link from the Etrusia Protopage.  http://www.protopage.com/etrusia/

This has links to this blog, to Etrusia and to several news feeds.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/are_virtual_u2_concerts_better.html – says “are virtual u2 converts better than the real thing?”

Probably.

Great programme on Channel 5 tonight. Current archaeology in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Incredibly only a quarter of Herculaneum has been excavated. Fantastic things on this programme included wooden furniture, half-painted statues, half-painted frescos.

It also showed my favourite thing- the pavements and kerbs and stepping stones.

There was a fascinating trip down an incredibly sophisticated sewer system. They also looked at human excrement and various odds and ends using an electron microscope. There was a visit to a baker’s shop and they showed how the grain was ground. The oven was brilliant- just like the sort often used today to bake pizzas. There was even a loaf of Roman bread.

Catch the repeats or buy the dvd if they release it.

There are some new articles on Etrusia’s Roman history site. http://romans.etrusia.co.uk/roman_pompeii.php is a brief introduction to Pompeii and Herculaneum, with links to some 30 year-old photographs of parts of Pompeii that may not all be accessible to a visitor today.

There is also a short article on Hadrian’s Wall, on the same principles – a basic background introduction to the Roman monument that stretches across the whole of the North of England, with many sites along the route which will interest visitors. http://romans.etrusia.co.uk/roman_hadrians_wall.php

More shameless plugging, I guess.

There is some good new material on the Anglo-Saxons on http://saxons.etrusia.co.uk/ which has just been remodelled and will be further extended in the near future. This would be a useful introduction to a little-known period in English history for senior school pupils following the national curriculum in History. It is also an interesting condensation of knowledge about the Saxons for anyone with an interest in British history.

Continuing the discussion about the book by Chris Smith and his co(ghost?) writer. Like the previous poster, I have not read it either, but since when has that stopped a reviewer? (I’ve read a review in the Guardian.)

Their premise appears to hang on a “big idea,” always a cause for suspicion, especially when one is trying to generalise about culture. There is a huge conceptual error in assuming that belief in a single god is in anyway associated with a commitment to solving problems logically (leaving aside the excellent point made in the previous blog that Christianity hardly has a monopoly on monotheism).

Didn’t the ancient Greeks invent all our categories of logic? How many gods did they have? Isn’t the Socratic method the basis of scientific and philosophical enquiry? Didn’t the Romans devise technical solutions to practical problems that are still used today? How many gods did they have? These examples do not even extend beyond “western” culture. If one also considers the scientific achievements of the ancient Chinese or Egyptians or any number of civilisations throughout history, it is clear that religious belief has little to do with development of practical science and technology.

Max Weber argued for a connection between religion and social development, in his 19th century work on the Protestant work ethic. He was arguing, however, that some elements of the Protestant world view led people to to reject external religious authority and value their own practical achievements in the real world. Very briefly, the Protestant religion supported the scientific and social development of industrialisation, whereas a Catholic world view was more closely associated with social stagnation because of its values of respect for authority and reward in the afterlife.

From this perspective, Weber was building an analysis of industrial society that could accomodate the role of ideas, as well as production and social organisation. There have been many more recent analyses of the interaction of social change and the realm of ideas and beliefs (e.g. Gramsci)

These issues are very complex and much of the writing is difficult to follow. However, none of it draws a simple line connecting belief and technology. Technology is a social creation. Its nature is inextricable from the social relations in which it is developed. Beliefs are also part of social relations. Hence there are interactions between belief systems and scientific and technological advances. However, a recognition that they are connected in various subtle ways does not support a simplistic assertion that belief A leads to technology B.

This is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the shortest in the Southern Hemisphere). This is as good an excuse as any to go to visit megalithic sites. A few thousand people were at Stonehenge and smaller number at Avebury and, no doubt, people went to many sites around the UK and Europe. Some of these people are so engagingly and entertainingly eccentric that you want to capture them for your own private zoo. Most are just people with a developed sense of history.

It’s hard to quarrel with anything that gets people enjoying visiting prehistoric sites. The automatic association between the summer solstice and megalithic sites is sometimes a little doubtful though. Some sites appear to be better understood as midwinter sites, anyway. I just object to the way that practical considerations rarely enter into our thoughts about these sites. No one considers that they may have been used in any other way than the rituals we project onto their builders, thus distancing us from any sense of their builders as just like ourselves. Which inadvertently opening the conceptual gate for those who think the stones were levitated into place or dropped by aliens.

We happily believe that generations of people would do the enormous amounts of work needed to construct these monuments, just for the sight of the sun coming up in one location on one particular day of the year (if there are no clouds – which is rare in the UK). If this were the sole purpose of these constructions, I suspect a simple sundial would have sufficed.

One of my cavils is with the idea of ceremonies being held on a specific day (the Solstice) and of people having to travel miles to attend them.

We are asked to contemplate people with no clocks or calendars except the likes of Stonehenge. So how do they know they are leaving on the right day, for a journey that may take weeks, until they get there?

You can only solve this problem by imagining a scenario where the religious leaders have to check the sun’s alignment everyday as it approaches midsummer, then have to send out messages to all their potential congregation a couple of weeks or so before the Solstice to tell them the time is close. Otherwise, everyone would have to have their own mini solstice clocks so they could tell when it was 5 to midsummer and start planning their journey.

Yes, this blog is ridiculous. It’s just a challenge to accepting whatever the latest archaeological fashion says is the purpose of these awe-inspiring creations.

The Register reported that David Blunkett had given the game away about the true purpooses of ID cards.See  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/15/blunkett_on_id_immigrant_tracking/

The Home Office has been busy denying that the ID card will be used for tracking people. However the former Home Secretary- who was responsible for introducing the mad plan – has shown this claim is as absurd as some of us believe.

A year or more ago, this was on the web to identify a potential security threat in Internet Explorer (but not in Firefox.) http://www.clipboard.googlemyway.com/  The threat was that your clipboard could be read when you visit a web site that has this line of Java code.

I came across the link while clearing out very old emails.  It still works but Internet Explorer does provide some protection now. I have misgivings about how far this is just window dressing. In any case try it and see.

It may not seem that your clipboard represents much of a security threat, unless you are unlucky enough to visit a site with such code when you have recently copied your credit card PIN in for another purpose.

However, today, just after transferring a huge number of Ms-Access records  to Excel and getting the “do you want to save the clipboard?” message , I realised that the clipboard often holds data that shouldn’t be available for general distribution. The records that might be held in the clipboard by a bank or a hospital could possibly harm someone. It’s not a completely trivial flaw.

Also, I’ve added the new tags to the past month’s posts, more or less.

This is a one-liner to let our readers know we have added a few more categories.

Microsoft discussed the extent of the online security threat, on 13 June before the Tech 2006 conference.

Microsoft’s Malicious software removal tool (MSRT) has removed 16 million items of malicious software from 5.7 million PCs since January 2006. This is an average of one virus, Trojan, rootkit or worm in every 311 computers.

Backdoor Trojans or IRC bots were the most common.

(Argh, and they’ve never even looked at this PC, which has had several occasions when the Greeks have started collecting outside and doing equestrian woodwork in terrifying profusion.)