Or is it because I've been around traffic more recently at rush hour? It is scary how many are going through traffic lights on late amber or just turned red, instead of slowing down and stopping as it changes to amber. At all the lights I've seen it at, I know that you can easily seeit change and stop without running it so late, but people do go through.

finally, the Observer has an editorial on the current economic situation which makes some sense. HIghlighs include:

At the heart of this calamitous strategy is a wholesale misdiagnosis of how the market economy functions and a complete failure to understand why the financial crisis took place, the profundity of its impact and its implications for policy. For a generation, business and finance, cheered on by US neoconservatives and free market fundamentalists, have argued that the less capitalism is governed, regulated and shaped by the state, the better it works. Markets do everything best – managing business and systemic risk, innovating, investing, organising executive reward – without the intervention of the supposed dead hand of the state and without any acknowledgement of wider social obligations.

The lesson of the financial crisis is that this is complete hokum that serves the political and personal interests of the very rich. It has been an intellectual carapace to permit the creation of dynastic personal fortunes while dismantling the social contract that underpins the lives of millions. Yet it has been this flyblown thinking that has informed British monetary, fiscal and financial policy for the last two years – uniting the governor of the Bank of England with the equally bewildered George Osborne. Both are at sea.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/20/observer-editorial-goverments-calamitous-economic-policy

Henchminion tried to post. The meat of it is that a PhD from Glasgow contains research indicating that, you've guessed, it is another Victorianism.


Your journal seems to be marking my comments as spam. Here are a couple of items that may interest you.

There's a recent PhD dissertation that looks at clergy and violence, tracing the development of canon law against clerics shedding blood and tracking the historiography of Bishop Odo and his mace/baton. The idea that Odo was carrying a mace so he wouldn't shed blood seems to have originated with Edward A. Freeman in 1869. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2671/01/2010gerrardphd.pdf

How long does it take to get rid of old ideas? Are we currently recycling wrong ideas from the 1950's? Or are we filtering them better?

I've seen quite a few problems over the years in things like re-enactment groups and the like.
Perhaps the most dangerous is the successor problem and a number of variations upon it. When the founding generation of people get bored or old or other parts of life demand too much time, you often end up with a sort of mass exodus as most leave within a short period of time. This means the organisation ends up lacking in depth, experience and knowledge.
There is little that can be done about this, except making sure you have a decent intake of people, some of whome will stay.

A variation is what happens when a new chair or president is installed, with their own ideas of how to do things. They can alienate old members, and may make mistakes which cost the organisation in time and money. Or they demand inputs which the rest of the organisation doesn't want to give, whether time or money. Often their ideas are good and necessary, but they are not set out or imposed tactfully.

Ideally you need to be grooming younger members to replace older ones, but if your organisation only has a limited number of suitable people then your options are limited. Extending periods of office can give breathing space, but I find that ultimately the input/ output of societies is a bit random - one year you get lots of new members, next year you don't, but there has been no change in what the society does over that time.

Delegation is important for avoiding the president/ chair from burning out due to overwork, but depends to some extent upon the qualities of the people you are delegating to, and how much time they have to do what needs to be done.

There are other problems which I can't quite recall just now. Feel free to mention them in comments.

that abbots or Bishops took a mace into battle because they couldn't shed blood comes from? It has a small flaw in that such a person probably shouldn't be bashing people around the head anyway or killing them outright.

I have stuff that I don't need, but surely someone would be able to make use of?
Cuprinol woodworm killer, a cheap but seemingly unused wok, an old picture frame, and some other bits and pieces.
Anyone used any sort of get rid of your old stuff online thingy before?

Or the heaedlines. Are the people who write them uneducated?
For instance, Yahoo news has a headline "Friends mourn teen killed in tent by BBQ gas". What, really, they died from inhaling butane? No, it was carbon monoxide. What kind of moron writes a headline like that?

Then there is the story on the Thunderstorms of yesterday.

"Britain could be braced for more thunder and lightning after a "special" type of storm swept across the country, bringing with it a tornado to some areas.
Forecasters said there was a "definite chance" of further thunderstorm activity after an unusual "supercell" storm travelled through the south Midlands on Monday afternoon, bringing rain, large hailstones, and a tornado in Oxfordshire."

What kind of illiterate moron puts such short quotes into an article. Or are they scare quotes? Who knows? Why put quotes around a specific, technical label such as supercell; that is what they are called so why the extra symbols which disrupt the text and make the author of it look like an idiot. Who knows, maybe they are?

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rare-type-storm-sparks-tornado-210613161.html
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/friends-mourn-teen-killed-tent-bbq-gas-080017588.html

I bought an old book, published in 1968, called "The wonders of Science". It is clearly the last gasp in a specific type of book/ compilation of short items from picture papers and the like - 20 years later you'd be far more likely to find some of its audience reading 2000AD or a magazine about music.

Anyway, at one point it has something about vaccines, and says "Even now we are still searching for effective vaccines against diseases like polio and influenza, not to mention measles and mumps"

Ha ha! We have vaccines against all of them now. Of course there is the small problem that antibiotics are running out.

So, how did they make and use dagger scabbards?
I can find bugger all information in the literature that I have available to me just now. It appears that from the 14th century onwards, dagger scabbards had chapes made of copper alloy. But how were they attached to the bottom? By glue? Maybe, although some have a few holes on the back that might be for sewing them onto the leather scabbard.
Even worse, what about the top metalwork?
( Read more )

Steel_bonnet posted this:
Not bollocks- just simply using stories for different ends, Jung used them as a metaphor, much as Freud used Greek myth, as a means of comprehending new concepts that they were both creating due tothe lack of any othe rmeans of expression.
It's no different from me using Superheroes as a mnemonic and French school of Fencing as a metaphor for some psychotherapy theory today- which is something I do, and I suspect someone who knows either better woudl find fault with my simplifications to get ideas across. Doesn't mean it is bollocks, just a convenient common langauge to use until a new specific language develops, or a layperson learns the technical language, to manage the needs of a new field of philosophy/thought/science.
Eventually Jung described himself as a Witchdoctor rather than an Alchemist as he found their language/stories more relevant to his work, and abandoned Alchemy as a metaphor since it didn't suit his needs anymore.

Which may be fair enough in terms of what Jung personally used alchemy for; the issue is that lots of allegedly clever people seized on his writings and tried to explain the historical evidence of alchemy using these modern metaphorical terms. That is where the issues come in, and Jung's works led a lot of people to minimise the role of actual chemical operations in alchemy, to the detriment of the general understanding of the topic.