Louisa's book

Very impressed with Lousa's book, Managing Very Challenging Behaviour, which has now come out. Dipping into it I come across pearls such as on forgiveness: "We have to forgive and move on. If students are not given second chances... they run out of options altogether". So much more enlightened than the garbage that comes out from zero tolerance headteachers and other tsars of behaviour and society.

google control

There have been a lot of articles worrying about google and how the company, whose motto was "Do no evil" seems to be doing much evil. The main concerns are about how google mines information about everyone that uses it's services, which is basically everyone that accesses the internet. Apparently, every search made using google extracts, through cookies, information about the search and the searcher's computer's ISP.

Given that google freely offers Blogger, Google news, Gmail and other services, it is in a very advantageous position to glean personal information about billions of people. The innocent arguement (sic!) is that this enables google to offer "targeted" adverts and services to clients, based on their preferences when using the 'net. The more sinister and realistic scenario is that, like in the Truman Show or with North Koreann brainwashing, a filtered, distorted version of reality is forced upon the public. This enables a manipulation of the truth of what actually is happening in the world.

When watching the TV news, I don't much take an interest in every item, but I wouldn't want a situation arise where news presenters were to presume what my interests were and only show those.

BIG BROTHER is upon us. And for what reason?

education, education, education

What a travesty of Governmental promise! But more a tragedy of socialism. Blair offers education, education, education as the start of his premiership and traduces this to banding of children by intellect and making all schools beome privtatised. The comprehensive becomes down-graded to a "levelling down" process. Campbell has already set the scene with his perjorative of the "bog-standard" comprehensive. Education is now more ruined than it has been for many decades. Will it be retrievable by this present government, or will they, like docile sheep, baa "ayes" to pass this bill?

time

It occurs to me that time moves like a stream of water, flowing in one direction, forwards. The water's edge always being NOW, whilst the area the water has covered is the past, and the area yet to become wet is the future. This implies that time is on a gradient, as water can only flow downwards, under gravity. How is this explained by physicists? What is this gradient?