The Barnum Effect

The sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and goldfinches all seem to have had a successful year judging by the number of batty baby birds flitting around my garden. Yesterday the fledglings were vibrating their wings and chirping for food, but today the parents are using the "monkey see, monkey do" educational technique to teach their demanding offspring how to forage for themselves. There is something utterly charming about the young birds, their feathers all fluffy and ruffled, with their inelegant and haphazard flights from perch to perch, often landing on the flimsiest of branches which oscillate wildly under their weight.

I was up at 5:30am to meet my dad and his dog Jessie for a walk around the lake at Roundhay Park. As is often the case at that time of day, the sky was clear, though rain has threatened since. There wasn't a whisper of wind and the lake reflected park and sky perfectly. The view had the makings of a fine one thousand piece jigsaw. Back home, after a little breakfast, I caught up on some telly on the BBC iPlayer. On a whim I watched Wonderland - The Trouble With Love and Sex . I hadn't seen an episode of Wonderland before, so I didn't know what to expect. I was quite taken with the concept - the voices belonged to real people who'd agreed to be taped during their counselling sessions at Relate, and the footage was a cartoon interpretation. It was insightful to listen to these sessions, with the nuances of body language and expression heightened by the cartoon characters, seeing them immersed at times in the imagery from their psyche. There was a point in the document

The other day a popup dialog appeared asking if I'd like to upgrade to Firefox 4, to which I blithely agreed. Woe is me. In Firefox 4 the buttons have been moved around and the address bar has been incorporated into each tab. Trivial stuff, but I'm becoming more adverse to change for the sake of change as my brain fossilizes into middle age. When I discovered the option to move the address bar back to its proper position I resolved to stick with version 4. After the next reboot my Firefox woes began in earnest. Each time I tried to navigate to a new page, open a new tab, or even refesh the page I was on, Firefox 4 hung in a not responding state. The browser would eventually spring back to life, but the net effect was much the same as if I'd reduced my connection speed to 2400 baud, placing Firefox 4 in the chocolate teapot category of browsers. Googling 'I hate Firefox 4', 'Firefox 4 sucks' and other such blunt phrases I discovered I was not alone in

Recently a wedding and a funeral have conspired to keep the AV referendum at the bottom of the news agenda, but it deserves more attention. The First Past The Post (FPTP) system has allowed our democracy to flounder in a evolutionary eddy. With FPTP there is no incentive for cooperation or constructive debate. Instead we are poorly served by the "Oh yes we will!" and "Oh no you won't!" pantomime politics we so commonly see in our House of Commons today. AV would be a great leap forward in evolutionary terms. Parliamentary candidates would have to work much harder to be returned as an MP for their constituency, requiring more than 50% of the vote, rather than a simple majority. Party politics would focus more positively on the policy similarities with their rivals in order to garner secondary votes. Coalition governments would be more likely, but this would foster a more adult and collaborative approach to government. There is a fear that AV would lead to a

Barack Obama today announced that US ground forces have killed Osama Bin Laden. Will this make the world a safer place? I suspect not - bloody retaliation from Al-Qaeda seems more likely. I would not be surprised if the UK threat level increases from Severe to Critical in the next week or two. Will it save Obama's presidency, and give him a second term in office? I hope so. While unpopular at home, Obama is still well thought of outside the US, where we continue to enjoy the pleasant novelty of an American president whose IQ is larger than his shoe size.