My Shoes are in a Drawer

A few years ago we got a new kitchen. (Use Google if you don’t understand how that is possible.) We knocked the old one through to a room we hardly used, and spent more than many people’s yearly salary having everything gutted and replaced. Despite the additional space, we ended up with less storage than we started with. And so ensued a year of not knowing where anything was, because Barbara would frequently reorganize everything she hadn’t been forced to throw away, in an attempt to fit it in.

Last year we decided to replace our bedroom carpet. Apparently, it wasn’t worth doing it without having the cupboards replaced, the walls re-plastered and redecorated, the bed replaced, the chests of drawers replaced, the curtains replaced, and doing much the same in another room as well. As before, it took a whole year and we ended up with less storage than we started with. And as before, there then ensued a prolonged period of not knowing where anything was, because Barbara frequently reorganized everything left from her new round of throwing things away, in the new round of trying to fit stuff in. This time it was doubly frustrating because she often couldn’t remember what she’d chucked.

Eventually I got her to understand that she must tell me when she moves something I obviously need to know about.

But on the very first occasion that she remembered, I was left dumbfounded. My shoes are in a drawer! Sorry, does not compute. My shoes are in a drawer? An ordinary drawer? To try to process this, I intone it. “My shoes are in a drawer.” I’m thinking of having it tattooed on my arm.

Ridiculous Snooker Competition Format

This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable. It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner. Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are differen...

Rescuing People from Cults

It isn't hard to imagine a child being brought up by parents within a small community of bizarre cult beliefs. The child would initially accept the programming without question no matter how damaging, because that is what small infants are hard-wired to do. Later they might begin to question the ideas, but everyone they know would profess conviction and it is easy to see the difficulty of snubbing their entire community and becoming a social outcast. If we were able to rescue the victim from the grip of the cult, then even as an adult it would be difficult to reverse the damage. We would need to train the critical thinking skills that all cults must suppress to exist. Our efforts might well look like the popular notion of 'brainwashing'. This is precisely what the Chinese are being accused of with the Uighurs. Some are calling it "psychological torture", and even the BBC are calling it "systematic brainwashing". "Wait a minute," you say, "...

Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha...

Aniseed Balls

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