Not enough fivers
Just seen a report in the paper that Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has criticised the high st banks for not putting enough fivers in circulation. This gels with experience - several occasions recently I've had to accept a whole load of coins in my change as the shop or pub didn't have any £5 notes.
I hope things will change, I really don't want to see a situation like travelling in India in the 80s and 90s, you had to cling on to small denomination notes as no-one ever seemed to have change.
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Mediaeval village exhibition at Kenilworth Castle
Ideal place to play with the new camera. :)
30 years on
Last night the bbc had a documentary on punk rock. It was great to see all the old clips, especially the sex pistols being interviewed by Bill Grundy, while at the time the swearing on prime time tv seemed so juvenile, now it seems really quite iconoclastic.
Tonight there's one on Bob Marley playing in 1977.
This was the sort of music we all wanted to see at the time but the official media wouldn't touch it with an extemely long barge pole (I suppose the grundy incident made that a certainty). Kinda strange it's now achieved acceptability, the context has changed and the 'threat' has dissipated. Perhaps the lack of anything original coming out of the music industry helps explain it. But then again punk and reggae came from industry outsidersn the biz itself was if anything even more clueless then.
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Bob Soloway arrested
One of the most annoying and prolific spammers ever has been arrested.
This guy owns a business called NIM, NPR and many other names and his trademark spam was the one beginning:
email advertise like this to 8,000,000 people this week for free..
http://www.emailadvertisinginc.com/
Though it wasn't just annoyance, this guy has screwed up lives and businesses:
The false headers he put on emails led many people to have their legitimate email addresses or domains blacklisted by anti-spam groups.
The authorities are seeking a USD772,000 fine which is probably chickenfeed to him. A fairer punishment I think would be to fine him every last cent he made from his vile business.
Sod's law
One of the main applications of sod's law is in designing computer sdystems: if you don't allow for a situation, however unlikely it is, it becomes almost a certainty to occur. In fact some would say the more vehemently it's rejected during design meetings the shorter the timescale in which it will happen.
It strikes me there's a similarity to the strong anthropic principle, albeit in a perverse way. It states that the universe requires an observer to exist. As I prefer to think of it, it's possible many universes have existed, but lacking an observer, they mattered not a monkey's.
Both this principle and sod's law bind external material reality to consdciousness.
Would this therefore imply a universe without observers would also lack misfortune?
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