Aniseed Balls

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, "

Back in June I expressed concern that religious beliefs, and all the irrationality they foster, might be risk factors for ignoring the dangers of Covid-19, and thereby be contributing to the death rate. Ten weeks on, I want to give some examples of circumstantial evidence for this. In mid-July I went out to buy spices in Harehills, which is full of good ethic shops of many kinds. The area is 40% Muslim, mostly of Pakistani heritage, but with a significant minority born in EU Accession countries (since 2001). These figures come from 2011 census data . Judging from the shops and some local knowledge, many of these Europeans are from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania. I hardly need mention the grip Islam has on its working-class believers, and Poland is the most Catholic country in Europe with 93% adherence . Romania has 85% adherence , and Lithuania 81% . These figures come from the Wikipedia articles on those countries, and the Religion in Europe article shows that 'religiosity',

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

When it comes to preventing the spread of coronavirus, which of the following pairs do you think are most likely to ignore the bio-security advice of the World Health Organization and the government, to fail to admit to themselves that they have the symptoms of the virus and to fail to seek proper timely medical assistance? Would it be those who think we should trust the science (even if patchy), or those who think giving money to Buddhist monks will bring them good fortune? Would it be believers in the germ theory of disease, or believers in the Gaia theory of disease? Those putting trust in physical barriers, or those putting trust in the power of prayer? Those who think that social distancing will protect them, or those who think God will protect them? Those who think a vaccine would help, or those who think reiki will help? Masters students in Respiratory Care, or Masters students in Wellness Training? I claim that in each case the first group will be more prudent than the seco

The government have been keen to make international COVID-19 comparisons when favourable, and to claim that comparisons are dubious when they are unfavourable. At the same time, most of the charts shown in the media are next to useless. So here is a chart type you won't have seen. It shows new deaths against total deaths for different countries. Things to note: Most charts you will have seen have time on the horizontal access. Here we have total deaths. This shows the underlying relationship much better, and eliminates the difference in epidemic start dates between countries. Total deaths only ever increase, so time progresses from left to right for each country, but not in a linear fashion. The new deaths are smoothed out by averaging over the previous seven days. This eliminates weekly cycles and some anomalies of data collection. Both axes have logarithmic scales. The linear section of each county's data represents the exponential part of the growth in the