Jim Stewart's Blog

Actually – I won’t miss anything. But a lot of people will. I started thinking about alternatives.

On Christmas Day – take the phone number of a friend and change one number – call it and wish whoever answers a happy Christmas. Or maybe if you feel a bit wicked you could call it just after midnight and claim to be Santa lost/stuck at Dover.

Get together a few random odd gifts and post them out to people that would never expect them (gets them feeling nice and guilty). Best to post before Christmas and get them to arrive after Christmas.

Get a pocket of change (sanitise it) and walk round town leaving coins on window sills.

But seriously – a lot of people need a lift as we head in to a New Year. Next year is promising to start harder than this year. Give some thought to how you can put a smile on another face.

In Facebook there are various settings for your friends lists. You can let anybody see the, you could let friends see them or you can keep them private.

But my personal details are on your friends list. Have you asked my permission to let others have it? Are you passing my personal details to somebody else without my permission? If you have dodgy friends, or click on data mining algorithms are you breaking the law? Do you ever use your facebook account for business – then the answer might just be yes.

Data mining and aggregation is big business – without it facebook and google would find life much harder. And then there are companies like Cambridge Analytica.

There are some people that protect themselves as much as possible, but they can be let down by friends. As people try harder to get our data we need to start thinking about each other – don’t share each others data.

A bit like a pandemic – we take care of ourselves to take care of others.

I went out for a long walk the other evening. A train passed – about half of the passengers did not have masks.

I passed several wine bars, pubs and restaurants and looked through the windows.

People were loud – really noisy. Did you know the louder you speak the more virus you spread if you are infectious.

People were moving from table to table. Did you know the more groups of six you join the faster the virus spreads.

People were close to each other – particularly in the outdoor smoking areas. But some tables were pretty much back to back, with less than 1m spacing between them.

We all know that it won’t make any difference if we just bend the rules once – well maybe a little risk.

There are some nice modelling tools out there. I ran one based on a restaurant that met the current restrictions. Going out for a meal in a restaurant actually carries about a 1 in 100 chance of ending up in hospital. And remember – that is a Tier 2 area with low infection rates in a restaurant that meets all the rules and the old style virus.

Still looking forward to that meal out?

BBC has changed the lead story tonight to say the PM hopes not to have a new lockdown.

Earlier today all of the news channels were saying “PM refuses to rule out another lockdown”. Quite a normal comment, you hear comments like that all the time. But what does it actually mean? It is an odd way to say something.

It is a bit like saying “Man refuses to give the date when he stopped beating his wife”.

What it is saying is that the PM cannot see the future, and so cannot tell you what will happen.

But there is a sub-text. It is saying “We think a lockdown might be needed but we can’t get the PM to agree with our speculation”.

If a newspaper article uses odd language think about it carefully.

Interesting reading about the concern a lot of people have about the Christmas break.

There are some interesting models around – so I ran one. A typical Christmas day with 8 people that manage to avoid touching, just sitting together in a decent sized room. Without windows open then if one person is infected there was an estimate of 3.5 people getting infected from them. With windows open that dropped to under 1.

But that is without people touching (including handing out plates etc). So the bottom line is – if somebody is infected at a Christmas get together then somebody else will get infected as a result.

So people are worried about a Christmas blip in infections.

But there is one thing that will be really interesting to see. SAGE estimated that education added 0.3 to the R value. And education is taking a break over Christmas.

So maybe, just maybe, we will not see that blip at Christmas. But just think about what that would mean – it could confirm we could get rid of lockdowns and tiers if we paused education for a few months.

Of course the other side of the coin is that people missing education makes it hard for people to go back to work. Of course that would never be the reason education is such a priority….

… in Havana was on today. I remember I studied it at school – it was one of the books I really enjoyed.

So I watched it. And I wasn’t disappointed. Yet again I realised how much I prefer a film with good acting. Most of the modern films seem to rely heavily on music to set mood rather than have the actors portray it.

There were some classic lines in it

You eat what you are given – that’s democracy

When you become unable to change your bar you have become old

And maybe one for this year

You should dream more, reality in our century is not something to be faced

Maybe that is one of the answers to the time we are going through.

Well, there we have it – Trump has lost. The majority have chosen Biden.

I was watching a game show today and they had a question about top ten hits of some singer I had never heard of. But apparently they had a lot of hits.

So I started looking stuff up – what was in the charts 10, 20 and 30 years ago – which songs do I remember from the charts. Who was Skanty Sandwich? Is it just a sign of getting older?

So I looked further back – and it was much the same then. How come London Calling by The Clash never made it into the top ten?

Does that mean the majority are wrong? I don’t think so. It just means I am in the minority when it comes to popular music.

I know some friends that will be upset that Biden has won. But the important thing is to recognise that they are not wrong, it is just their view is different to the majority.

Don’t expect me to get up and boogie to the current top 10 (although only 3 of them are recent releases). And don’t expect Trump supporters to start to support Biden.

But we can respect each other (yes – go hug a Trump supporter).

I saw a game show today where one contestant said “What’s the point of playing if you don’t win”. Well of course there is the making of money, that must be important.

Everything to some people seems to be about personal victories.

There was a programme about T E Lawrence the other night. I used to stay in the same accommodation (club) in London that he stayed in – that was on late nights in London when it was a pain going home.

In the club there was a line of photographs of club members that had won the Victoria Cross, many of whom gave their lives for others. People like Thaman Gurung always get my respect – people that were prepared to die so that others could live.

How sick is our society when personal gain is seen as more important than personal sacrifice for others.

I mentioned last night that I had watched “It’s a Wonderful Life”. One of the things I saw in it was the black maid that was enjoying a good life in the Bailey house.

It reminded me of the ban on showing “Gone with the Wind” – because it showed a similar maid in the slavery era. I wonder how long it will be before wonderful life gets a warning.

It got me thinking – what about Downton Abbey, or Upstairs Downstairs – are the lives of the servants realistic or are they rose tinted glass representations?

In 1000 years will Klingons be considered our equal, or will Star Trek be banned?

To me there are numerous representations in films that are not representative of reality – that show people that had a miserable life in happier than expected circumstances.

There are also other films that paint people as evil because we want to feel good about abusing them – like the Cowboy and Indian films, or maybe some of the war films that are so common. But they don’t really get a warning.

Do we only object to things that are trendy?

I was thinking about what to write tonight and I came up with a good subject. But I can’t remember what it is now. It was interesting – I was just talking this week about some of the ways my mother told me she used to remember things. I never understood at the time, but now I find myself using the same tricks. I guess I must be getting older.

I have always been fascinated by memories and how they work. You see something or hear something and a bit of biology re-arranges itself so you can immediately recall it. I remember one cart accident I was involved in when the policeman asked if I could recognise the driver. He was the only other person there, but to be honest I could not have picked him out of a line-up. My brain had not recorded his face.

I can remember the case of the stolen biscuit. There were two of us in the house and we shared a biscuit. It was the last of the pack. When the biscuit owner came back the other person swore they didn’t eat the biscuit. When I spoke to the other person that shared the biscuit alone they were sure they were telling they truth.

In our study last week I heard that one sign of honest responses to police investigation were differences in stories. People actually remember things differently. We are not computers, our ability to record memories is good, but not 100% accurate. I’m sure we adjust memories a little.

It must be getting near Christmas – “It’s a wonderful life” was on today. I have watched it every year for about 20 years. But today I saw something new in the film that I had never seen before. When young George Bailey wonders why the old chemist is upset the camera flashes to a telegram telling him his son has died. For the first time today I saw that his son had died from flu. I guess it might be the circumstances we have been through that made me more sensitive to that.

Odd things our brains. I guess what we surround ourselves with affecting our memories and our behaviour is pretty obvious, but I wonder whether we take deliberate steps to adjust our surrounding.