Chadwicks and Nicklins in the Same 1906 Photograph
These are some of my blood relations in 1906. The two guys on the right hand end of the second row down are Chadwicks and the first guy on the front row is a Nicklin.
St Stephen's Old Church Robin Hood's Bay
This is the graph you will not see presented often in the media – I had to make it up myself. It shows the proportion of the vote and the proportion of seats in the House of Commons both plotted together from the results of the May 2010 election (649 seats declared).
The Conservatives only got just over a third of the votes but they got nearly half the seats. Labour got 40% of seats with less than 30% of the votes and the poor old LibDems only got 9% of seats with 23% of the vote. 52% of people voted for a left of center progressive party of some kind ( a lot more if you think of the Greens and various flavours of Socialist and Communist) but we are headed for a right of centre government.
I am afraid the UK is not a democracy in my mind. Yes the Conservatives are the largest organised group but this is tantamount to government by a minority.
In Scotland fewer than 1 in 6 people voted Conservative yet we will end up being ruled by them – this makes a very strong case for independence.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman: ”What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966) published in The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6 (1969)
My blog post “Bitter taste after eating for days – caused by pine nuts?” has just past the 1,000 comments mark. Today’s count is 1,013.
I have been thinking of trying to get funding to research a DNA barcoding system for pine nuts. I am sitting here surrounded by people working on DNA barcoding of plants and it seems a feasible thing to do but I keep putting it off. Having this constant stream of comments coming in makes me think I should do something about it.
Now if everyone sends me $100 on PayPal – just kidding 