Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

After my ‘Universe’ posting which has probably had most of you cancelling your subscription to my blog, I thought we’d continue the ‘education’ theme with some interesting statistics and facts.

Did you know that the dear old Frenchies have the longest sleep time of any people on earth, taking 8 hours 50 minutes to catch 40 winks? So that’s where my tiredness comes from.

Did you know that Qatar has the highest ratio of men to women, an astonishing 307 men per 100 women which maybe explains why my son, Tim, who’s serving out there at the moment with the RAF, has been chasing camels! Just remember Tim – they spit, but then maybe the girls you meet in Glasgow do so as well!

Which country produces more gold than any other country in the world – 270 tonnes a year? Nope – it’s not South Africa as we all thought, it’s China, and J has most of it in her jewellery box by my reckoning!

Iraq is the largest recipient of aid, at $9.1 billion in 2007. And all because of the black, liquid stuff under its desert.

The United States uses the most energy, 2,321 million barrels of oil equivalent. No surprise there is there? The United Kingdom is 10th with 231 million. So your average American uses 10 times as much energy as your average Brit. Does this explain a few things about US foreign policy?

Qatar has the least safe drivers, with 9,989 injuries and 33 deaths in road accidents per 100,000 people. And it’s probably risen since Tim went out there – what a driver!

The largest number of tourists head to la belle France, at 81,900,000 in 2007. And most of them seem to bloody well come to Tourrettes and drive around at 15km per hour!

Of the 100 largest ‘economies’ in the world, 57 of those are actually companies. The other 43 are countries. And as an example, Wal-Mart with annual sales of $246 billion is the world’s 19^th largest ‘economy’!

Before the seafaring nations discovered them, the Americas (both North and South) had a population of some 100 million people, most of which were wiped out, not by slavery or fighting, but by European diseases.

When a city in Montana (US) banned smoking in public places in June 2002, the heart attack rate in its citizens fell by 58%. And when the tobacco lobby overturned the ban, the heart attack rate climbed back to its original level.

Of the 530,000 or so soldiers killed during the American Civil War, an estimated 315,000 died of disease.

It’s strange but true but more people die of donkey kicks than are killed in air crashes.

And finally – let’s come clean about this ……. toilet seats are usually one of the cleanest surfaces around the home or office, probably because they are frequently cleaned. Phones, computer keyboards, desktops and doorknobs are commonly inhabited by between 10,000 and up to 100,000 bacteria per square inch. It’s also said that your toothbrush, assuming it’s kept in the bathroom, will have more bacteria on it than your toilet brush. Since I told J, my blonde wife this, she’s started cleaning her teeth with the toilet brush. We don’t kiss anymore!

Have a great weekend.

Sarkozy Mark II

The little dictator is at it again. Not only did he manage to get his son by his first marriage, Jean, a job as a councilor on his old mayoral patch in a fancy part of Paris but now he’s trying to force him onto the La Défense district (pictured) as chairman.

OK – so what’s wrong with a bit of nepotism here and there? Let me tell you what’s wrong with it. First of all, Jean is still at school (ok – university). And secondly, he’s never had a proper job, which is probably an obvious statement, given that he’s still at kindergarten. The guy is 23 for goodness sake and Sarko is trying force him into a job, against the establishment’s wishes, where he’ll be running the biggest financial district in Europe outside London’s Canary Wharf.

I’ve worked in La Défense. All the big firms are there. BT, IBM, Honeywell. The big consultancies. The big hotels. It’s like Canary Wharf in that it’s a city in its own right with a Gross Domestic Product bigger than many developed countries.

It’s not a particularly great place to work but it’s a lot closer to central Paris than Canary Wharf is to central London and there’s no getting away from it, when you work there, you know you’re at the centre of something big and important. The same feeling you get when you work in the City (of London) or Manhatten.

So what is Sarkozy thinking about? I reckon it’s him having a go at the ‘establishment’ again. He’s well known for it. Most of France’s top business leaders and its civil servant mandarins have attended the École nationale d'administration (ENA), France's highly selective post-graduate school. If you go there, you’re made. It’s like a ‘club’ and to prove how selective it is, the ENA produces fewer than 90 graduates a year.

Sarko never went to the ENA and after being elected, he ensured that unlike French governments of the past which had battalions of ENA alumni in the most senior posts, he would promote ‘normal’ people, friends and acolytes to the new government.

Forcing his son into one of France’s most important jobs is just another example of his attempt to stuff the establishment but he’s coming under significant pressure on this one. The ridiculous nature of the proposed appointment has even got the French public up in arms and Sarkozy’s popularity rating has plummeted since his high following the G7 and G20 summits.

This is one to follow.

And The Good Book Says .....

Readers of my blog will know that I’m a bit of a right winger and have previously called for capital punishment to be brought back to sort out the increasingly violent society in which we live. I’m therefore all in favour of the capital punishment programme in the US where certain states execute killers, rapists and terrorists.

There’s been a few stories recently about executions in the US, the latest being a situation where after two hours of trying, the death penalty of a murderer could not continue as they could not find any veins in his body into which they were supposed to put the lethal injection. There is now a group asking for his death sentence to be commuted to life but did this guy take any pity on his victims, who may have been begging for their lives? No ! My view - if they can’t find a vein – shoot him.

The other article about capital punishment in the US was where a 32 year old murderer who blasted his victim in the face with a shotgun was sentenced to the death penalty. Nothing unusual there except that I thought that it was the judge who decided on the capital punishment option but here, it was the jury. And in order to come to their recommendation they first consulted the Bible, which apparently has a passage which says, ‘And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.’

And therein lies the problem. The defence lawyers found out about this and appealed on the basis that the jurors had been ‘improperly influenced’ by the Bible but the trial judge rejected the claim, a decision later upheld by a Texas appeals court.

In the US, the constitution calls for the separation of state and religion and in 2005, the supreme court in Colorado overturned a death penalty on a convicted murderer because jurors had consulted the Bible while deliberating over his sentence.

Commuting Robert Harlan's sentence to life imprisonment without parole, the Colorado court ruled that the Bible constituted an "improper outside influence" and a reliance on what it called a "higher authority".

However, a federal appeals court ruled last year that while the Bible should not have been allowed into the deliberation room in the Texas trial, there was no clear evidence to indicate that its actual use in that trial had influenced the jurors' decision.

And do you know what the prisoner’s name was in this trial where a bible most definitely decided his fate? His name was Khristian (OK it was Christian with a ‘K’) but how ironic is that ?

The Royal Mail Strike – Look At The Picture

I am no stranger to strikes. At Chrysler, when the company’s car park was full of unsold cars and management wanted a walk-out (strike) they’d simply instruct me to speed up the production line and within minutes the workers would be heading out the door and making tracks for the nearest pub or betting shop.

Nobody really lost out on these occasions because, the spare cars would be sold and then the factory would have to work overtime to make up stocks. The workers would make more money than they would have (prior to the strike) because they would be paid overtime rates and management would use the down-time (during the strike) to perform critical maintenance on the lines. It was all a bit of a game – everybody knew what was going on so there was no real animosity.

Not so the proposed Royal Mail strike threatened for this week. It won’t really impact me of course but all the discussions on the TV with the union bosses and the mail management is just a throwback to years ago when strikes blighted the UK on a weekly basis. Management want to modernize the Royal Mail systems and the workers are opposed to it because getting machines to do more of the work means fewer employed union members.

I’ll simply say two things about this. When my father-in-law got totally fed up with running a very successful and lucrative shop in Glasgow, primarily because of the stress involved with frequent break-ins and the long hours, he looked around for a job which had absolutely no stress, had no responsibilities attached to it and would allow him loads of free time. After a lengthy period of research he chose his ideal job ….. and got it. A Postman!

Secondly, look at the picture at the start of this blog posting. That’s a betting shop in the background. Those little red buggies are postman’s trolleys. The guy walking past doesn’t look like a postman because his shirt is the wrong colour. All the posties are inside. Says it all really doesn’t it?

PS – the picture from one of the UK nationals wasn’t associated with the Royal Mail, it was actually about William Hill, the bookies.

What’s Out There?

I was watching a programme on the universe the other night and far from helping me understand what it’s all about, which is what I was hoping it would do, I switched off after it had finished, more confused than ever. I mean, what exactly is going on out there? Anybody know?

Take the earth – we’re part of the Solar System which formed from some bits of gas, sand, rocks and stuff approximately 4.6 billion years ago. An awfully long time. And it seems that the sun, the centre of our solar system and on which all life on earth depends, will flicker and die in about another 5 billion years (according to the programme) so worry not – we’ve got as long to go as we’ve already had.

But back to the main part of the lesson. Earth is in a galaxy called the Milky Way (why’s it all about chocolate bars – galaxy – milky way ?) and there are apparently at least a billion stars in a galaxy. Now there are supposedly billions of galaxies – our nearest is Andromeda which is only 2.5 million light years away, a light year being 5.8 trillion miles. So, go on then – work that one out. What’s 2.5 million miles multiplied by 5.8 trillion miles? Quite far I would say.

My point is – how do they know this? I guess some bright spark (pun intended) worked out how far light travels in a vacuum (the speed of light) but how did they then know how far Andromeda is? It’s definitely not on the AA Route Planner. And how do they know there are at least a billion stars in your ‘normal’ galaxy? Did someone do a count?

And so we get to the main point of this posting. WE ARE NOT ALONE. How can we be? If a galaxy such as ours has over 1 billion stars and there are over 1 billion galaxies, it would be awfully churlish to say that life does not exist out there somewhere amongst the billion billion things floating in space. And if you’re of a religious persuasion which insists that God created life, who’s to say that there aren’t other God’s out there creating garden paradises and messing about with ribs and apples and stuff?