Great Until The Last Bit

Due to their being an estimated septillion stars in the observable universe and the total number significantly higher as it is just the number in the bit of universe we can see, the chances that the Earth is the only planet with life on it is madness and it is assumed alien civilisations do exist but we just haven't found them and by the same token, it is doubtful they have found us so they are not coming all this way to not say hello and just make patterns in wheat fields or stick a probe up the odd drunken rednecks backside.
What i assume also is that they are more advanced than us, we only came up with successfully leaving our Planet's gravity 70 years ago so they could have a massive start on us if we were busy hanging around in trees 6 million years ago and trying to not get getting eaten by a massive Dire Wolf when they managed it but a team of scientists from the UK, US, Sweden and India say they can prove that we are clever enough to track them down.
The international team of researchers have devised a way to search for extraterrestrial megastructures, known as Dyson spheres and say they have  identified seven of these huge things lurking in the Cosmos.
A Dyson sphere is a swarm of objects that orbits around a star to harness it's energy and the team say they have detected the technosignatures from these potential Dyson spheres.
Analysing data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, as well as the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope to carry out their work, they investigated around 5 million sources to build a catalogue of potential Dyson spheres and after sifting the possible wheat from the chaff: 'Have identified candidates that display anomalous infrared excesses that cannot be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation such as nebulae and background galaxies' the researchers say.
From five million down to seven and the researchers feel confident that these seven are legitimate but then, right at the end they add:  'We acknowledge that there could be other reasons why the group is emitting excess infrared and additional analyses are definitely necessary to unveil the true nature of these sources' which kinda punctures the rest of it.
Bloody spoilsport scientists with their caution and insistence on rigorous testing and peer-reviewing as they continually build up their knowledge of things over centuries and centuries.

Evolutionary Waste

Modern day Humans are the product of thousands of years of evolution so it's no surprise that sometimes we come with a few spare parts which are left overs from our earlier incarnations so what remnants of ancient ancestors have we still got that we don't need and what where they for anyway?  
The Appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine which in our early incantation helped digest tough plant matter and acted as a reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria but now the only thing is does is sometimes explode and get hastily removed.
The Coccyx is also sometimes called the Tailbone which is exactly what it is, the remnant of vertebrae that once formed a tail in our mammalian ancestors to hep balance while swinging about tree branched but since we learnt to walk upright, it's just something whose only use is to be difficult to spell and make Microsoft Word underline it when you write about how we don't need it but are stuck with it.
Wisdom Teeth were useful to our larger jawed forefathers as they were ideal for grinding down a tough raw diet of plants and meat but as we now cook and soften our food, our jaws have shrunk but the Wisdom teeth didn't get the memo and still turn up and sometimes have to be surgically removal.
We have have lost most of our body hair but the Arrector Pili Muscles are still inside the hair follicles and where they were once great for contracting and making us appear larger to whatever wanted to eat us for lunch, now when they contract they just give us goosebumps when we are frightened or cold which is a pretty naff thing to have as we already know and dont need our non-existent hair to tell us.  
The Auricular Muscles allowed our earliest ancestors to move their ears to better pinpoint sounds like a dog or cat but since evolution gave us the ability to turn our heads, they just sit there giving some people the ability to wiggle their ears which is a pretty cool party trick to be fair.
In the forearm is the Palmaris Longus Muscle which helped ancestral primates to climb trees and grip branches but since a massive meteor wiped out the dinosaurs and we could come down from the trees without getting trodden on by a Woolly Mammoth, no use but still it remains as a handy source for tendon grafts in surgery apparently.
Back in the day when we were somewhere between being ex-fish and wannabe apes, we had a third eyelid called the Plica Semilunaris which slid across the eye for protection and moisture and though many animals such as birds and reptiles still have them, we have regular eyelids and tears so don't need it so it has shrivelled to that small fold of tissue in the inner corner of the eye.

You're Ai, And You Know You Are

Is nothing safe from the cold, dead hands of artificial intelligence? Certainly not if you’re in the business of trying to win football matches because it's the the game’s newest double act.
It has crept in like Gabriel Magalhães at the back post at a corner kick and is being used in tracking player movement to offering tactical tweaks and has been as common at training grounds as bibs and traffic cones and is now being used by clubs to predict fatigue and even scout kids while they are still trying to grapple with which of Henry VIII's wives lost their heads.
VAR, of course, burst onto the scene and with semi-automated off-sides, it is conspiring to make us celebrate twice, once when he ball hits the back of the net and again once it has been checked for 5 mins to determine the strikers big toe wasn't in an offside position when he prodded it in.
Obviously many workers are concerned that Ai will be taking their jobs and many Employers are pondering on whether to allow the machines who don't need paying, holidays or coffee breaks to take the strain but what about football?
The Seattle Reign head coach, Laura Harvey, admitted that she had used ChatGPT to help determine her team’s tactics, asking it what formation would win them the most games in the National Women's Soccer League  and it spurted out every team in the league and what formation they should play.
They are currently 5th in the 14 team league and last season they finished 13th and having won 10 games so far against their 5 wins last season, it seems Ai may be asked for tactics and suggestions by managers all over so AI isn't going to be put on the Subs bench anytime soon as it turns into a real life version of Football Manager. 

Why Are We Left Or Right?

Interesting question, why do people become leftwing or rightwing?
Personally, i'm not sure i was even aware of a left or right wing ideology when i become 'a lefty', i had my views and later found out that they chimed with the Left but then my parents were both Lefties so it could have been i was raised to have those views from a young age, i also grew up in the era of Margaret Thatcher and her cruel right wing ideology so that probably had an effect also.
Maybe it is nothing to do with nurture and is down to nature as perhaps some people are just drawn to a certain side of an ideology but i lean more towards it being a result of parenting, society and our own experiences or even out of antagonism towards ideological parents and their upbringing.    
I asked someone at the Political Psychology Section at the British Psychological Society and they seemed to think that it is a bit of Nature and Nurture, Nature designates our temperament and our emotional experiences and Nurture which shapes our sensitivities and emotional responses. The strongest emotion, they said, is empathy and how much we empathise with others and the more empathy we hold, the more a person will lean to the left and less empathy often result in leaning more to the right.
They did say that political ideology is not fixed though and as we live our life social tribes,  exposure to other ideas, friends, family, media, teaching, what we read and learn all go into our ideology all mixed with a healthy dash of a private inner sense of what is right and wrong.
Very interesting, i love a bit of Psychology and I am sure they know what they are talking about but i always refer back to a 2013 study published in Psychological Science that found  people with right-wing views are less intelligent than those of us with left wing views.
The British Cohort Study found that right-wingers tend to be less intelligent, have lower reasoning ability and more racist and homophobic views than left-wingers and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to hold right-wing views.
Nice to have it clarified by science and remember if you are unfortunate enough to come across a Right Winger, remember talk slow to them...they are not too bright (or they had right wing parents and therefore little empathy).

 

FOAB: An Apology

 
To all staff,

It is with a heavy heart that I take keyboard in hand to inform you of the resignation of both my parents, the General Father of FOAB, Mr P,  and also the blogs Mother, Mrs P, the Chief Executive Officer of FOAB.
Please rest assured that during this turbulent time for our blog, our commitment to blogging is undimmed.
As you will be aware, the FOAB output has been under intense scrutiny in recent days, following complaints about our Posts from President Donald J Trump.
We always welcome that scrutiny and the opportunity to correct errors which is why i commissioned an investigation of bias within FOAB and found the resulting Memo deeply disturbing as it was found a systemic bias for describing the US president as being as thick as a whole carpenters store of planks of wood as well as being a 'giant Orange toddler', 'Mango Moron' and an 'Apricot coloured Fascist'.
Worse than that, FOAB made repeated mentions of the lies the US President made about his extremely close friendship with the most prolific pedophile in the modern era without explanation that actually, Jeffrey Epstein was friends with him, not the other way around.
There have been suggestions that the collapse in the quality of FOAB has been the result of the owners failure to emphasise many of the benefits of his Fascist and racist policies however it was never my intention that collapses in standards would lead to inaccuracies about people I disgreed with.
Most importantly, nothing could have been further from my thoughts than the idea of offending any Fascist, racists, close friends of sex offenders or even any low IQ right wingers who i disagreed with.
FOAB policies have now changed, and henceforth all mentions of the American President will make it clear that his weird, birds nest hair is actually a good look, that his face is not the unnatural clownish colour of a ripe carrot and that any mention of his being a racist, Hitler loving sex offender with a criminal record is balanced by mentioning him ending so many wars that he even had to make some of the combatants up.  
As a peace offering, I have dispatched to the White House a pair of extra small child's gloves to keep his teeny tiny hands warm and a framed copy of the legal documents pertaining to his various legal cases.

I hope this will bring an end to the matter.

Yours,

Lucy P
Blog Owner

Missing The Snow

Yypical. You wait all year for some snow and then the second you head off to warmer climes, it snows.
Every weatherman, weatherlady and weather app is predicting an icy blast is sweeping down the UK from the Arctic next week with temperatures plunging down as far as -8°C as our old friend the Jet Stream shifts downwards and leaving the UK on the colder side of it.    
In the South of the UK it is very rare that we get snow and cold weather warning issued by the the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) covers most of the top half but have warned that this could be slid down to cover further areas next week and some reports do have flurries spreading right down to the south coast of England although not in significant amounts.
The MET Office are advising people to keep an eye on the forecast in their area as it is possible warnings may be issued for snow and ice at times.
Try and stay warm people but also, make snowmen and throw snowballs and just enjoy it.

Is America Great Yet?

 I speak to American journalists a few times a week and i always start with 'Is America Great yet?' to which i get a varying degrees of answers but usually, nah, not yet but i did ask about the $2,000 which each American is going to get as a Tariff Bonus.
To me it sounds like making them pay higher prices for the essential (his claim that other nations would pay was always nonsense) and then giving them something to make up for him making them pay higher prices for the essential things but $2,000 would be gratefully received i guess a because as the Tangerine Tyrant said 'The tariffs are bringing in so much money, a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone' so get the good China out and toast the Mango Moron.
A fly in the ointment could be that analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will see the American public pay an additional $200 billion to $300 billion a year and a $2,000 dividend, if it went to all Americans, including children would cost $600 billion which is why the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said that it might not mean that Americans would get a cheque from the government but instead would probably take the form of tax cuts for some.
So what did the Fushia Facist promise would be cheaper for Americans?
He promised that: 'I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One' and specifically mentioned groceries which official data shows rose by 2.7% since he made the promise with the sharpest increases on Coffee (18.9%), Ground beef (12.9%) and Bananas (6.9%) so not so great then.
The price of eggs have gone down though, a dozen large eggs was $4.93 then and are now $3.49 a dozen so omelettes all round but you may want to hold fire if you have an electric cooker because he may have said: 'Under my administration we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months' but unless my maths is very wrong, going from 15.94 cents per kWh in January to 17.62 cents per kWh today isn't halving them.
Cheaper cars and petrol under $2 a gallon was another thing he promised supporters to get prices down on however, the average price of a new car went up from $48,283 to just above $50,000 today and petrol remains stubbornly $1.079 above the $2 figure so you may want to walk to the shops to get those eggs.
So making America great again can be added to ending the Ukraine War on Day one and how he never signed a birthday card for Jeffrey Epstein to the list of things inane and things the Orange Ogre has farted out.

About Time IOC

In everyday life, a man can live as a woman and a woman as a man without to many issues and good luck to them, its none of our business, but when it comes to sporting competitions, that is something which i have always said is a step too far because it seems very unfair that women will be competing against with such a massive biological advantage, especially when athletics spends millions trying to catch drug cheats trying to gain the tiniest of advantages.   
Sport did seem to get itself tangled up in knots over it but maybe all it took was the spectacle of men punching women in the face in Paris in 2024 for the International Olympic Committee to decide it may not be fair after all.
In 2003 the IOC decided that that men who fully transitioned to live as women should be allowed to participate in women’s sport but then later in 2016, softened the rules to say that trans-identifying men could compete in female events as long as they took drugs to lower their testosterone.
Then athletics, swimming, rugby and cycling ruling bodies decided to protect their women’s category, they would based inclusion on biology and the IOC position changed to deciding that each sport could make its own rules and then came Paris 2024.
Then came the 2024 Paris boxing rounds and the inclusion of trans women Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting, both of whom were biologically men but took testosterone lowering drugs and both who won gold,
Possibly stung by the backlash of having to defend a man hitting a woman, the IOC commission a report by biologists and athletes and last week they announced that: 'The evidence shows that men retain sporting advantage even if they suppress their testosterone' and the IOC now have a decision they can use to decide who is able to compete.
It amazes me just how complicated this has got because to me, and i am aware that this puts me very much on the opposite side of some people who feel this is unfair to anyone who's gender is different to the one they were born with and as i keep pointing out, you can choose your gender but you can not choose your sex, and no operation or hormone drugs will change the biological facts that a person is XY or XX and that should always be the deciding factor and it shouldn't take a biological woman being punched in the face by a biological man to make other people see it too. 

The End Is Nigh For Keir

It’s as good as over for Keir Starmer. However long he limps on, even if he somehow stumbles to the finish line of the next election, his race is run which is amazing for a Prime Minister with a 174 seat majority and four years left in office, but the Fat Lady is practising her scales and gargling with the Aquafresh.
The maneuvers to replace him have began, despite the denials from those obviously jockeying for position behind him and it is shame because he seems a decent guy, just a decent guy who had a chance to make real change after the previous lot and completely wasted it.
My best guess would be that he will limp around to the May 2026 Local Elections where Labour will get a Royal tonking and he will be thanked for his services and ushered away while the Labour Party members put a cross next to who they want to replace him and give the Country it's 7th Prime Minister in just over a decade.
Count them, David Cameron quit after disastrously taking us out of the EU by accident, Theresa May gambled on an election to improve her Parliamentary majority and found herself with a smaller one, Boris Johnson treated Downing Street like a nightclub while ordering everyone else to stay at home, Liz Truss bankrupt the nation in just 44 days and was outlived by a lettuce,  Rishi Sunak was so weak within his party that he sought a dissolution of Parliament months before he had to and was duly toppled by Keir Starmer who could fall into a puddle and make the puddle even wetter.
The question should be then why are the crop of recent British Prime Ministers so terrible at their job?
Some will point to the UK never really recovering from the 2008 Financial crash and there is some truth in that and the things that followed, Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine War only made things worse but many of the events which saw the previous PM's removed were nothing to do with any of them things and were self inflicted mistakes so we can hardly blame them.
Others point to the constant scrutiny by 24 hour news and social media but you would assume that would make them less likely to do stupid things and probably accounts for Keir Starmer who seems much more attuned to the way the wind is blowing, and then doing the required contortions to try and bend as many ways as possible, attempting to try and please all the people all the time.       
Maybe, we as a population, are now just ungovernable with the way we have split into not just left and right but those sides have split into smaller factions which leaves the historical big boys such as Labour and Conservatives, out on a limb with traditional Labour voters breaking away to the Lib Dems, Greens and Your Party and the Tories being cut in half by Reform.
I would guess that the days of one party rule in the UK is over and from now on it will be coalition parties making up the Government but that brings it own problems as deals are hashed out and agreements made but the most galling thing is every MP will tell you they entered politics to make things better, but when they got the chance to actually do it, all of the last 7, to quote one of them, spaffed it up the wall.

Insanity That We Did Nothing

Former US vice-president Al Gore told UN delegates at the Cop30 meeting in Brazil that :'It is literally insane that we are allowing global heating to continue' and according to a report from the Climate Action Tracker, the World is on track for a catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise.
To put that into context, at the mid 19th Century, when the Industrial Revolution really took off, the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 280ppm while today it stands at 425ppm which is the concentration last seen around 4.6 million years ago in the Pliocene Epoch.   
You may hear people (generally the ones with a vested interest to play it all down) say the the atmosphere is always changing and that is true, it does but by humans pumping our poison into the atmosphere it has taken 250 years to go from 280ppm to 425ppm which is many times faster than it increasing this much naturally, ice cores showing it taking tens of thousands of years to match the current human-caused rate.
The rapid pace of the modern increase means that the current human civilization is experiencing conditions never before seen in its existence,  and since the mid 19th Century, global temperatures have risen by 1.3C and Climate Change is taking a strong grip with fiercer storms, wildfires, droughts, floods and other calamities so it is a scary thought what a doubling of this will unleash on our future generations.
Al Gore then is right to say it is literally insane to allow it to happen but then it shouldn't come as a surprise because environmentalists and climate scientists have been telling us for decades and decades what will happen if we don't roll back the CO2, and yet the people who could do something did nothing and here we are and if you think this is bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.