Let's hear it for the Mullwarchar!
Radio 4's 'Today' programme has been asking for nominations for a 'listeners peer', and I've been listening with half an ear to the suggestions. And what I've been hearing is more of the same old same old; the soi disant great and good, and, more particularly, the metropolitan great and good. So I thought I'd make a nomination completely outside the London box.
The Mullwarchar, admittedly, doesn't say a lot. The Mullwarchar is notoriously neither clubbable nor friendly; not a particularly sociable being. But the Mullwarchar has made a great contribution to our public life, taking a leading role in the campaign against the dumping of nuclear materials and a number of other environmental campaigns. The Mullwarchar has also made a significant contribution to leisure activities and to appreciation of wilderness, and thus to the spiritual life of the nation.
But the most important reason for nominating the Mullwarchar is this: this mountain will not come to Mahomet. The House of Lords is comprised entirely of urban people, of people not merely prepared but happy to spend their working lives in the most crowded, the most polluted, the most unpleasant place on the island of Britain. Such people are by definition abnormal and unrepresentative. It would do our parliamentarians good once a year to go to the mountain: to lift up their collective eyes to the hills, to be in a place where man and all his works are utterly insignificant. To get some sense of scale.
Spectacle and courage
In trying to write a concise review of the extended edition of Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Return of the King, one is faced with three different topics each worthy of consideration. The first is this cut of The Return of the King as a movie; the second is the package with its appendices; the third is the total achievement of the whole project, which this set completes. It's going to be very hard to do justice to all three in just a thousand words.
The Movie
So firstly: The Return of the King, or more precisely this cut, as a movie. Consistently Peter Jackson's extended cuts have been, in my opinion, better movies as movies than the 'theatrical' cuts. There's a lot of new material here — not just extending scenes, but many scenes which were left out of the theatrical cut altogether, which add to characterisation, pacing and story telling.
A lightweight 100% Java RDBMS
Introduction
IBM have a 100% pure Java relational database management system which has been called at various stages in its history SQL/J, Cloudscape and Derby. IBM are now eagerly pushing the system to open source developers under the 'Cloudscape' label. I downloaded it to evaluate for use with PRES and other Jacquard applications.
License
Using, not losing, your head
Cycle helmets are a good thing, aren't they? It's obvious. They protect your head. They must be a good thing: it's common sense. Why then is the cycling community, in the face of proposed mandatory helmet legislation, fighting internecine helmet wars?
Don't panic
Before going into the details of this argument, let's start by putting this into perspective. Cycling is actually a very safe activity. Nothing, of course, is absolutely safe. Last year, in Britain, 114 cyclists were killed. Of those, 95 (83%) died as a result of collisions with motor vehicles. But that's out of millions of cyclists, covering billions of miles. In fact, according to the National Statistics Office, there is on average one fatal accident for every twenty one and a half million miles cycled. Twenty one and a half million. If you were to cycle ten miles every single day, it would be nearly six thousand years before you had a fatal accident.
Lies, damned lies, and cycle helmets
I've just been moved to write to the British Medical Association, a thing which doesn't often happen. The BMA had a critical role to play in the recent campaign to make cycle helmets compulsory in the United Kingdom; they have long had a well thought out policy on cycle helmets — on the whole favouring them, but aware of the ambiguous nature of the evidence in favour of them and siding against compulsion. Their position helped persuade MPs not to vote for compulsion. It seems the pro-compulsionists have seen the BMA as a key target to convert, and recent press releases have announced a policy change, apparently by fiat at the top. The papers the BMA have published in support of their new policies are masterpieces of dishonesty and sloppy thinking. So here is my first, brief, critique, as expressed in an email to parliamentaryunit@bma.org.uk, the address they cite for comments.
My attention has been drawn to your web pages published at URL:[http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclhelmet](http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclhelmet) and URL:[http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclehealth](http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclehealth).
In the first you quote: "Each year over 50 people aged 15 years and under are killed by cycling accidents, with 70-80 per cent of these resulting from traumatic brain injury."