Mike Meredith

Not Everything On The Internet Is True

 General  No Responses »
Feb 152015
 

Wandering through Youtube as you do, I happened to come across :-

.. and was immediately struck by how dumb the selection of "facts" were :-

  1. Antibiotics attack bacteria not viruses. In fact the belief that they attack anything nasty smaller than the eye can see is contributing to the issue mentioned as the fact – that antibiotics are becoming less and less effective as antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria evolve. So whilst the video is right in the broadest possible terms, the explanation is full of shit.
  2. Shellac has nothing whatsoever to do with bug shit. It's produced by collecting a different bodily fluid, but obviously the narrator was confused between the two words secrete and excrete.
  3. The fact about Caesar was nearly right except that old Julius asked for his ransom to be raised from 20 silver talents to 50 silver talents (an increase of 2.5 times not double which is quite a big difference), and whilst Julius did crucify the pirates, he also had their throats cut first.
  4. The sixth exictintion (us humans causing an extinction event) is treated as a fact whereas it is currently a plausible hypothesis, but by no means a fact. Not that we shouldn't improve our behaviour to our fellow planet dwellers!
  5. We all eat 12 pubic hairs a year, The narrator even admits nobody knows of a source for this "fact". Well guess what? If you don't have a source, all you have is an entertaining story. 
  6. I couldn't be bothered to check, but I suspect the "fact" of big agriculture breeding huge workforces of children to work farms because there are US labour law loopholes is a bit far off base.

Out of a list of 15 so-called "facts" at least 50% were horse-shit and in the case of the remainder, there's a fair few I've not bothered checking. Best bet is when you look at a video claimimg to have a top 10 list of something is to take the whole thing with a pinch of salt. 

Remember The Tories Cheered When They Caused Misery?

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 102015
 

A while back, I commented on the Tories cheering the cuts bringing in a new era of austerity. I said at the time we should remember their cheers, and now we should do the remembering.

Whether or not the austerity cuts were necessary, the cheering by the Tories showed their true colours – they would rather cut benefits to the poor and working classes to reduce taxes for their rich friends.

Remember the cheering when you listen to their wheedling speaches to get your votes.

Remember the cheering when they claim to be on the side of ordinary workers.

Remember the cheering when you go into vote. And vote for anybody else (except UKIP).

Animal Cruelty, Slaughterhouses, Halal, and Kosher

 General, Religion  No Responses »
Feb 092015
 

After a public release of a certain video of animal cruelty found within a halal slaughterhouse, there has been a certain amount of "noise" regarding animal cruelty :-

For the benefit of those too sensible to hit "play", some of the most striking things about the video :-

  1. The workers have no compunction about treating the animals with a great deal of cruelty including taunting them.
  2. Supervision seems to be non-existent. 
  3. The "quick cut with a sharp knife" seems to be a slow sawing with a blunt penknife.

I should say from the beginning that I'm a vegetarian so I'm unlikely to be sympathetic to the problems encountered by slaughterhouses (shut 'em all!). I'm also an atheist so I'm unlikely to have sympathy for religious beliefs insisting on medieval slaughterhouse techniques (if you can find a sheep that requests Halal or Kosher execution, then by all means go ahead).

But the reaction to the videos has seemed to concentrate on point 3 above, Or more specifically the need to kill by a quick cut of a knife.

Whilst I'm not keen in the quick cut method, it does seem to me that the cruelty of that method is outweighed by far, by the attitude of the slaughterhouse staff and the design of the slaughterhouse. In other words, I can easily imagine seeing a video portraying pretty much the same level of cruelty when the slaughterhouse staff are wielding a stunbolt gun. 

It seems to me that to reduce the level of cruelty, we need to have robust supervision by people who are not going to put up with any kind of abuse. People with the power to hit the big red button, and send everyone home for the day. 

Yes, there's an argument about whether the requirements for Halal and Kosher count as animal cruelty, but this video shows far more generalised animal cruelty that can be found at any badly run slaughterhouse. The question is: Just how many slaughterhouses are badly run?

The “Secret” Christian Subsidy

 Religion  No Responses »
Feb 062015
 

I happened to discover today that there is a chaplain within the House of Commons in the UK; fair enough. I don't really have a problem with someone being there to offer some sort of support to the HoC staff. Not even letting them incant some mumbo-jumbo at the start of the day.

But who pays his or her salary? Is it the Church of Englang? Or is it the government … and indirectly, the taxpayer? Which includes me.

I also don't have a problem with a single salary for a member of the clergy – one salary doesn't add up to much compared with the entirity of the public sector. But how many others are employed by the taxpayer?

  • The NHS employs chaplains.
  • The prison service employs chaplains.
  • Universities employ chaplains.
  • The military employ chaplains.

And probably other murkier corners of the public sector. Now when I say "employs", there are some areas of doubt – some are volunteers, and some may be paid for by the Church of England. But there are obviously many who are paid by the taxpayer.

Now I don't want hospital patients, prisoners, University students and staff, nor anyone in the military being derived of chaplains. If some people think they provide a useful service, then I have no objections to them using such services.

But why is my money being used to pay for their services? I would much rather my money was used to pay for properly trained counsellors which would provide appropriate services to all members of the public without being ever so slightly creepy (by talking about the mythical sky-daddy … or indeed the "wrong" mythical sky-daddy). If someone wants to speak to a religious consultant, then a counsellor can find a volunteer to meet that request.

Labelling a FAT Filesystem

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Feb 022015
 

Undocumented command options … grrr!

Every so often I find that I have a need to put a volume label onto a FAT filesystem – usually so a digital camera SD (or CF) card can be "automatically" mounted (actually they don't mount automatically on my workstation and I like it like that) in the right place. And of course every time I do, I remember that the command to do so is mlabel but I cannot remember exactly how to do it.

Because mlabel (together with the other mtools) has some sort of weird configuration file to turn Unix/Linux paths into drive letters‽ And yes that was an interribang although it could just as well be some other form of punctuation to express disgust instead. As it happens mlabel has an undocumented option to specify a device path … at least it doesn't appear in the usage hints :- 

» mlabel -h
Mtools version 4.0.17, dated June 29th, 2011
Usage: mlabel [-vscVn] [-N serial] drive:

It turns out that there is a "-i" option which takes a device path, but you still have to specify the drive as "::" just so things are less likely to go right :- 

» mlabel -i /dev/sdi1 ::
 Volume has no label
Enter the new volume label : LEICA1

And there it is!

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