Damn and blast

For starters I'm sick and tired of it, how any species that manages to cross its air and food intake passages got beyond evolutionary puberty is beyond me. Having hot coffee go down the wrong way and provoke coughing is not a good reaction when a hot coffee mug is still in your hand. I just about managed to put it down before the major hacking, but caught my fingers on the handle in the rush. Spluttering and coffee stains. I think all Creationists and Intelligent Designers should be forced to wear a badge saying "Don't save me from choking".

Speaking loosely of fingers, Livescience posts a report on mathematical and linguistic skills based on finger length note it's done on children so may not apply to adults. Simply put if your index finger is longer then your ring finger you have better literacy skills, or maths skills for the reverse. Doesn't say from what points they measure from, but measuring down the middle from the tip to the palm crease I get 77mm and 78mm for index and ring fingers respectively, which tilts me towards maths.

Jim H's friends-only Livejournal has him rant about the service or should that be lack-of-service in fast-food restaurants; running out of ingredients; getting the order wrong and basically not giving a damn. As we tend to follow America in all things that's something to look forward to here if we don't already match that level of ineptitude.


Rubbish still makes the news I've already commented on this to some extent. The big non-news is that the councils now want to charge us by weight/amount. This'll lead to fly-tipping cry the nay-sayers, no it'll lead to padlocks as people dump their waste in their neighbours bins and get them to pay for it. In other words the plan's unworkable. Ah we've still got to reduce the size of our landfill sites.

Okay how about going after the producers of all this rubbish. I picked up an external USB hard drive as a portable back-up store, (just to send Invisible into apoplexy I got it from PC World as their price wasn't that much different from online prices). The drive itself is about as big as one hand, the box I had to carry with two. Totally unnecessary even citing necessary padding as the drive itself had its own padding and was supposedly shock resistant. The only reason for the size I could see was that the manual was larger height and length-wise then the drive; I kid you not.

The biggest change is to aim at businesses, oddly they pay council tax often at greater amounts then domestic owners for the same equivalent valued property and yet receive less services. How about offering them a free fortnightly pick-up recycling service? Oh sure some companies already recycle, but they're the ones paying for it to be done so why should they bother?

This has other benefits too, while I find it unlikely that someone will take recyclable rubbish home from work to put in their bin, people taking rubbish from home to put in the office's much larger bin seems a likely possibility. Also rather then have to take a special trip out to the recycling banks, just take it with you to where you have to go anyway. If the company itself is not paying by weight/amount for it to be done the company could even encourage this.

But no harass the domestic user; they don't have access to legal teams to fight regulations they don't like. Of course they have other means to fight... expect large numbers of bin-bags to appear outside of council offices. Bet those'll get collected pretty sharpish.