04May04 — 1

The Real Master Of The Universe

The vast majority of the overpaid ninnies who “manage” active British investment funds and US mutual funds are shit at their jobs. It takes special abilities to underperform blind indexes both when markets rise and when markets fall, but 82% of UK funds have done that over the last twenty years. To add insult, they charge ordinary people ridiculous sums of money just to piss their investors’ life savings away.

And don’t give me that “high stakes and high risk work deserves high salaries” crap. I wouldn’t mind them being so absurdly richly rewarded if they could cut it, but they can’t, the public school twits.

Warren Buffett, on the other hand, can. For his efforts he earns $100 000 a year. Most City spivs would laugh at that kind of “compensation”, but he’s the second richest man on the planet because he actually knows a good investment when he sees one, a skill for which his company’s shareholders are deeply grateful. The loudest laugh is his.

He also talks straight, unpretentious sense.

04May04 — 0

Young Men In Spikes

My dad warned me—and I hope Auriol isn’t offended if I write this—but the BBC documentary about the four-minute mile that I ‘Blogged about last week (and my dad kindly recorded for me) sounded in places like a P G Wodehouse spoof. Apparently, after the race in Oxford, the leading runners were driven at top speed to London by someone called “Bunny”. Once there, Bannister insisted on changing into formal wear because he was “not going to be interviewed on BBC television wearing a tracksuit”.

Later they went out on the town. As they were driving away from jolly japes at Clement Freud‘s club in Sloane Square, they were stopped by the police for erratic driving. After questioning them, a police officer warned Bannister and co. that the Caribbean Club where they were heading was not a place for them to be taking nice young ladies like the ones accompanying them. Then he asked for their autographs.

04May04 — 0

No Smoke Without The Mirror

I got miserable and self-righteous about stories of US abuse of prisoners in Iraq last week, but now I’m just puzzled at similar reports about UK troops. It’s too strange seeing anti-war paper The Guardian fisking anti-war paper The Mirror by letting its picture editor loose on the Mirror‘s photos of supposed nastiness.

Meanwhile, in the USA, the former commander of the prison where the most infamous scenes of abuse were filmed goes on TV in person to state that she never witnessed them. Is there anyone out there prepared to argue with her?

04May04 — 1

My Kind Of Democrat

If this New York Times piece is right—

“John Kerry is doing exactly what he should be doing right now. He is in a post-primary molting season. He’s emerging from the shadow of Howard Dean and becoming more like the policy twin of Joe Lieberman: a pro-trade, fiscally conservative centrist Democrat who is willing to pour more troops into Iraq to win the war.”

—then I’ll be hoping for a Kerry win.

[via Tim Blair]

03May04 — 0

But Now I See

I’m running to Cambridge rail station with a rucksack on my back and a suit bag on my forearm. I’m going to Balliol Medical Society’s annual dinner and, as usual when I’m setting off anywhere by train, I’m late. This tends to happen when you think of yourself as living next to the platform. It’s never as close as it seems.

There is a small commotion going on in the narrow, car-lined street. Nearest to me, at the front of the fuss, is a taxi, behind it a red sportscar, and, behind that, White Van Man and his sidekick, Bobbins. White Van Man is shouting, “Come on! We haven’t got all day!”

I have slowed down to a brisk walk because the woman he is shouting at is crossing the path ahead of me at a steady pace. She lives just up the road from me and is, as usual when I see her, accompanied by her two little girls. She has a white stick. One of her girls says, “That man’s very rude.”
As she finds her way between two parked cars, my neighbour replies, “I know, dear. A lot of people are.”

The driver of the white van continues to shout. The driver of the red sportscar is quietly waiting behind his wheel. I walk up to the other side of the van and tap on the window: “She’s blind.”
Bobbins mouths, “Wha?!” and winds down the window.
“The woman you’re shouting at is blind.”
Bobbins turns to his glorious leader. White Van Man clambers higher out of the window, “Sorry, love, we didn’t realize!”

I start running again.

It’s the day after the dinner. I’m sitting outside my hotel waiting for the taxi to take me to Oxford rail station. I am perched on the low wall of the drive, facing the road. The hotel is hosting a “psychic event”; to my left is a poster board promoting it. Immediately in front of me is a shiny new Mini, as re-engineered by the Germans into a vehicle that won’t leave you a quadraplegic if you hit something while driving it.

On the dash of the car is a disabled parking display card with a rotating indicator to show how long the handicapped driver will be away. “I bet that’s handy round here,” I sneer, wondering to myself just how physically challenged the owner is. The only person who’s ever found it easy to locate a parking space in central Oxford in the last twenty years is Inspector Morse. I tell myself to have a more generous view of humanity. The weather is warming up nicely after all.

Within a few minutes, three late-thirty-/early-fortysomething women round the corner, arguing and laughing. One of them is complaining that her “guide” got “everything” wrong. The others are countering with descriptions of their own, more accurate, “readings”.
“Have you had a psychic experience, then?” I ask, looking up from my newspaper.
“You could say that,” one of them answers as they get into the Mini, still debating whether or not they got their money’s worth.

Sure enough, the driver has mobility problems. If, by “mobility problems”, you mean she isn’t quite up there with Michael Jordan.

I’m not cynical; I’m just cursed with powers of extra-sensory perception.

30Apr04 — 0

Jokism

[edited from The Motley Fool]

AMERICAN JOKISM:
You have two jokes
They share a huge apartment in New York which they pay for by working in a coffee shop
One is straight in real life, but gay on TV
They were both written by a room full of Harvard graduates

FRENCH JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You go on strike because you really wanted a melancholy song from Edith Piaf

JAPANESE JOKISM:
You have two jokes
They are one-tenth the size of an ordinary joke and produce ten times as much laughter
You use them as the basis for a series of anthropomorphic cartoon characters called “Jokémon” and market them worldwide

GERMAN JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You re-engineer them so they are no longer funny and send them away to be tested to destruction by a national standards institute

ITALIAN JOKISM:
You have two jokes, and apply to tell them on TV
You succeed after sending a photo of yourself as a balding, middle-aged man weighing 23 stone
The show is hosted by seventeen 25-year-old models with impossibly large gravity-defying breasts
There is an oompah band in the studio that strikes up when you tell one of your jokes
The girls giggle continously whilst you tell them
At the end of the show, the audience breaks out in wild applause and you are treated as a folk hero
You are never heard of again

SWISS JOKISM:
You have 5000 jokes, none of which are yours
There is an ongoing problem with some of the Jewish ones
But you charge all their owners for letting you laugh at the punchlines in private

CHINESE JOKISM:
You have two jokes
They have not been approved by the Central Peoples’ Council for Recreational Culture
300 people laugh at them and are immediately arrested

IRISH JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You apply to the EU for a subsidy and build a new cultural centre in Dublin where they can be performed in Gaelic
You tell everyone that Ireland is a poor rural country full of folklore and strange literary happenings
Georgian terraced houses in the city centre surge above €5million for the first time

ENGLISH JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You practise them in the bath

30Apr04 — 2

Too Depressing For Words

The revelations about abuse of prisoners by Coalition forces in Iraq are just grim. I should be making noises about their scale relative to pre-war Ba’athist crimes, about their being debated worldwide rather than hidden from any sight, about the court-martials that will be faced by (some of) the perpetrators. It wouldn’t change the crimes. And I can’t be bothered.

[UPDATE: My dad reckons “courts martial”, but my Chambers (bought by the aforementioned father) gives both “courts martial” and “court martials”, with the latter flagged as “informal”. “Informal” is definitely the style of English on this page. You, the readers, probably have your own views—cue fifteen comments worth of pedantry from the notoriously picky PooterGeekers.]

29Apr04 — 2

Camp Grenada

One of the top Google hits that brings people to PooterGeek is “Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder“. Ron Nilson posted a new comment to the relevant PooterGeek entry yesterday asking what classical piece Alan Sherman’s novelty record was based on. My dad provided the answer. It’s Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” from La Gioconda. And I should have spelled it: “Hello Muddah, hello Faddah”.

Oh, and here’s the ringtone.

We aim to please at PooterGeek.

29Apr04 — 0

Too Posh To Push?

Having listened to two radio discussions about this on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning respectively, I wanted to ‘Blog at greater length about this story, but I haven’t the time at the moment. I wanted to include a few links for the frighteningly large number of friends (and relatives) I have who might be interested, and I’ve sort of managed that: NICE’s full clinical guidelines on C-sections and the Royal College of Midwives’ opinion and an interesting Times [sorry, foreigners] editorial.

29Apr04 — 0

Normal To The Surface

For the past four days I have been at the the Cambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences, a lovely new collection of ultra-modern pagoda-style buildings housing the best maths department(s) in the country. I was attending a workshop on protein structure (and writing it up for a journal). The workshop, incidentally, was the best scientific meeting I have ever attended. To my surprise, I stayed awake through 95% of all the seminars and understood 75% of the content.

This is, I suspect, exactly the sort of thing my parents think I get up to for a living. Observing from a secret camera, they would have seen me standing near to people with Russian, Japanese, Italian and Oxbridge accents scribbling things on chalkboards and talking about probability distributions. Most science is the very dull business of coding, doing experiments and writing up the results. Discussing real scientific problems takes up a relatively small fraction of most practitioners’ working time. In fact my head hurts from hours and hours of unbroken thinking. The part of me that always stands outside my professional activities was slightly worried when, during one of the sessions, I managed to raise a laugh with a joke about a particular example of sampling bias.

Much as I am in awe of their specialist understanding—technically, I have a degree in physics, but my maths is shit—the mathematicians of Cambridge University were something of a disappointment. Apart from one guy with a mop of unkempt hair rocking back and forth next to a drinks machine and someone else playing card patience in the canteen whilst having a conversation with himself, the population of the maths campus was shockingly normal. There were even women around. The vast majority of the inhabitants had socials skills and clean, ironed clothes.

Perhaps they are stunt mathematicians, charged with performing the dangerous everyday tasks that the university deems too risky for valuable employees blessed with Asperger’s. Meanwhile, the real nerds work away safely in their offices.

29Apr04 — 1

Blackout

A lot of people are suggesting that American Idol, the US version of Pop Idol talent show, is racist because the black singers on the show have been consistently voted last by the viewers this season. Anyone who believes black people are naturally talented performers of popular music should be made to listen to my mum while she’s ironing.

28Apr04 — 2

Aur’s Dad Is Living In My Radio

My friend Auriol‘s dad [yellow shirt, right-hand side of photo] wasn’t one of the six men who ran in the mile race in which Roger Bannister broke the four-minute “barrier”, but he should have been. He is still an unbelievably active and adventurous man who yomps around mountainous, remote parts of the World for fun and is even having difficulty retiring from medicine. Now the BBC has tracked him down for a 50th-anniversary documentary about that famous race and every time I turn on Radio 4 since Sunday I seem to hear his voice in the trailer for the show. It’s spooky. (When I first met Auriol I was living opposite the Iffley Road race track.)

27Apr04 — 1

Singular

Tony Blair spams me; Stephen Hawking stalks me. I don’t work for the University, but in my two years in Cambridge I have been to the Department for Applied Mathematics and Physics exactly once and was directed to his office by mistake. (He had an Onion story about him on the door.) Yesterday I was at the Centre for Mathematical Studies for the first time in my life and fellow workshop attendees had me sit at the next table to his at lunchtime. Sod off Stephen, haven’t you got a whole universe to make sense of?

27Apr04 — 0

Mad As A Hat

Muammar Gaddafi vsited the EU today and showed that he is as coherent now as he ever was. Here’s a sample:

“…the aging Arab radical showed flashes of his firebrand style in a 45-minute harangue to a joint news conference, at which questions were barred, under the watchful eye of four of his women bodyguards in blue camouflage uniforms on the podium.

“I hope that we shall not be prompted or obliged by any evil to go back or to look backwards,”

Gaddafi said, after defending his past support for militant Third World “freedom fighters”.

“We do hope that we shall not be obliged or forced one day to go back to those days when we bomb our cars or put explosive belts around our beds and around our women so that we will not be searched and not be harassed in our bedrooms and in our homes, as it is taking place now in Iraq and in Palestine.”

courtesy of Reuters.

27Apr04 — 0

Some Should Have Prizes

The willingness of teachers to give out ‘A’ grades to their pupils in one state in the US seems to affect the performance of those pupils. This article summarizes a study of the effect. Ignore the writer’s political slant, but follow his various threads describing the results; they’re important, I think.

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