Comments by willstewart

'...reduce borrowing costs for troubled countries..'

But this amounts to Germans paying not just for past Greek (& French) overspend but for overspend yet to come. Can anyone give a sufficiently convincing reason why they should? Consider in particular that Germans are being asked to pay for Greeks & French to retire earlier than them and to work shorter hours. Would you vote for this?

Two thoughts -

1 - time for people (as opposed to us scientists) is about the sun.

2 - The energy saving argument (and similar ones about safety) assume that people do things like going to bed and getting up at particular clock times, as opposed to particular times of day. So this IS about influencing behaviour - and it does not work; people just stay up later and get up later.

This is because current devices use quartz clocks rather than syncing - but this is fairly easy to fix as they clearly have comms now (for data collection). A good thing to fix but a temporary problem. And FTR a man with many clocks will have a better estimate of average time than one with a single clock - who will just run in happy delusion 42 years off!

But this is yet another reason to stop the silly twice-a-year messing with clock time! PLEASE can we kill this absurd practice! Time is about the earth and the sun and should be above silly political efforts to make people get up and go to bed earlier, however desirable in principle!

I feel that this article has been delayed somewhere - clearly it should have appeared on April 1st.

Good article - but a key missing element seems to be why junk food is so attractive. It cannot be just price, even if the economists would like to think so - it is cheaper but not that much cheaper. And US food inventions seem to sell even when not apparently attractive; look at the horrible soggy 'sub' compared with the smaller and much nicer sandwich or baguette.

An notable factor in a UK study found that calorie intake was not the thing that had changed, it was output. So the rise in cycling must be good (car drivers still get far too much road space compared with cyclists and pedestrians), though I also suspect a link to central heating...

Hear Hear.

I agree that some manufacturer's websites (like Bose) sound as though they work as you suggest - but this is deceptive. If you read the words carefully you will find that the only way in which the phones 'recognize' sounds you wish to hear, like speech or music, as opposed to noise, is that these arrive at the phones as electrical signals on the on the cable rather than as sound. Speech that arrives at your ears as sound is cancelled and suppressed just like any other sound, except that there are frequency limits for cancellation. Continuous sounds are treated in just the same way (but are probably quieter in the first place). Nor are the phones adaptive - the characteristics do not depend upon the environment.

So sorry - the phones really are not smart enough to decompose sounds and treat different sounds differently! (this is pretty hard even offline - which is why old recordings are hard to clean up. You and I can do it but even powerful machines find this hard). If you doubt this consider that even professional interviewers with expensive equipment get unsuppressed wind noise (even with furry microphone covers).

It appears that 80% of Greeks wish to stay with the Euro - but to go on borrowing, too. This amounts to a desire to be funded by the Germans. Austerity looks inevitable one way or another; be it in Euros or Drachmas.

This sounds absurd to me! Do you really think that headphones are smart enough to tell speech from other sounds?!!!

They attenuate all sound but are typically less effective in the mid-frequency bands where speech is concentrated (as I said). If speech seems less attenuated this is probably because it is actually quite loud and we are very good at picking up the sense.

FWIW NC headphones are improving and my newish Bose ones do attenuate speech quite well (if train announcements actually count as 'speech!).

Who was it made the money that JPM lost? After all this is not wealth-creating banking, just passing round the chips.

As a frequent traveller in the quiet coach on trains I have a number of thoughts!;

1 - they DO work in that they are quieter than the other coaches. Condemning them for some noise is like condemning the Economist because of the odd dull article (perish the thought!). Partly of course they work because they are already less popular...

2 - Some extraneous noise is inevitable, though the super-loud announcements to the effect that the drinks trolley will not be available after Reading might be avoided.

3 - Sensible people react to circumstances. For example I was in the front quiet coach last week when it ran into a herd (really) of stampeding cows at high speed. This was very loud - no doubt the cows would have been more careful if they had realised we were the quiet coach. More interestingly all of us then started to chat, though no-one screamed (for the benefit of foreigners UK people almost never speak to strangers even in non-quiet coaches). We also borrowed each others' mobiles in order to warn families etc. , necessary because even without techie measures phones hardly worked in deep rural areas. And the 5-hour extra wait in the carriage was much relieved by watching movies in groups on laptops (without headphones!). No-one seemed to mind.

4 - Although I do like quite when beavering away on my laptop/iPad I note that the majority actual complainants are not workers like me but old retired people obsessing about mobile phones (even if used quietly). Of course I have the headphones - which help with those announcements, too. Or perhaps I am too busy to bother with trivia...

This is not really right - they cancel low frequencies well and the casing blocks high ones - but intermediates like voice tend to be attenuated but still understandable.

'exception proving the rule' is a misunderstanding (in English!) resulting from a change in the meaning of 'prove' of the years. In this context it just means 'test' (as in 'proof spirit' - meaning one with just enough alcohol to burn in a curious gunpowder-based test). The idea of 'prove' in the sense of taking a test and passing is fairly recent.

So a Greek exit would definitely test the rule - but with, as FE says, no obvious outcome!

You may be right - but there are much more important issues at stake. The House of Lords (HoL) currently contains a mix of 'career', meaning ex-house-of-commons politicians ( to borrow a term from a current novel) and what one might call 'experts', who have been very successful in a very wide range of other walks of life, from engineering & science through business, the arts and sports.

Having interacted a good deal with both houses the breadth & depth of knowledge, and frankly the intelligence, of the 'experts' is relatively and absolutely very impressive. Whilst the existing system seems democratically indefensible it would be a great shame to lose this resource for some vague 'democratic fairness' objective. Can we come up with some more 'democratic' method of selecting members for the upper house from the wider pool of successful members of the population rather than just politicians? It seems to me that there is some demand round the world for this and no-one has yet done better than the UK HoL.

Yes - and First class lounges at stations are arguably already this anyway (though you need a ticket). Come to that so are the trains.

And I do not equate connectivity with work - I can be called anytime after all but do take breaks from work! Indeed a connectivity break may be exactly what one needs in order to be able to work....

Whilst generally supporting your argument I think you might consider that these topics illustrate a similar core problem - the clash between the legalistic desire for clear binary rules and the fuzziness of the world as it actually is.

So in fact, whilst only a few extremists would argue that the egg-and-sperm is a 'person', or that a three-year-old child is not, the transition between the two in fact gradual. Much the same might be said of 'organisations' (from couples to multinationals), which clearly are not in fact people exactly but should nevertheless have rights.

I do not think that there is an easy solution to this; except perhaps to recognize that legal exactitude has intrinsic limits - there is a place for the ad-hoc decision-on-the-ground.

'they believed it was safe, meaning they believed the computer modelling which failed so miserably'

In fact the modelling was fine - but the bankers (perhaps as opposed to their quants) failed to understand what it was saying. The risk from any one failure was reduced by averaging (normally called insurance) but the risk of collective failure (like a hurricane, say) was unchanged. Quants (or at least numerate people) rather than traders should be in charge of policy.

Perhaps the UK does not so much dislike the EU as dislike its intensely bureaucratic (?Napoleonic) way of doing things. Of course we might campaign to change this...

The Scottish view on this question might be interesting, too.

The issue I have with your argument is that it seems to apply equally well to Yorkshire. Surely at some point we are our brother's keeper?

Paying by results works everywhere else - any system will work with perfect people (or robots) but systems for real people have to reward success.

And it is strange that 'Thatcherite' seems so significant an insult to some so long after she has left the scene. This odd obsession seems rather Scottish - why not rail against Adam Smith, who was more the free market philosopher than Thatcher? Just because she was English? or because she was a woman perhaps?