Life, the Universe and Everything

Now that the results are mostly in I have a few things I'd like to say about this UK two party fallacy.

I'm looking at the figures with two seats undecided, and we have:

Labour 9,539,730 votes (35.2 %)
Conservative 8,756,242 votes (32.3 %)
Lib Dem 5,977,043 votes (22.1 %)

For a start I think it's fairly ridiculous that we now get to be ruled for five years by a party that 64.8% of voters didn't vote for, but that's the way the system is and it's quite difficult to come up with viable alternatives. The really scary thing is when you realise those percentages are of people who actually voted rather than of actual voters - 38.7% of voters didn't vote at all, that's 17,000,000 people (approximately).

Now imagine that one in ten people didn't vote because they felt a vote that wasn't for either the Tories or Labour "wouldn't matter" - this isn't too far fetched when you consider that out of a sample of three non voters I know, 66% gave this reason. Let's also be cunning and assume that one in ten people who did vote voted tactically - ie. they didn't vote for the party they really like, they voted the way they did because they really didn't want to see either Labour or the Conservatives win a particular seat. In a very rough and ready way I'll just take 10% off each party a share that with the other two. This isn't excellent statistical analysis, but none of these assumptions are too outrageous I think, and gives the following figures:

Labour 8,884,609
Conservative 8,656,456
Lib Dem 8,004,550

I read this phrase quite a lot in the last week. I don't think it really means what people who're saying think it means, though. Is the world really more uncertain than it was, say, 90 years ago? Not really (and you know I picked that particular figure because it landed right in the middle of WWI), with advances across all areas of life people (in this country) now live longer and have far better medical support than they did then. Communication has improved to the level where the speed of light is the principal limit to how fast you can find out what is going on elsewhere in the world - there is more certainty now than there has ever been in the past. the problem is that what has replaced ignorance is the certainty that there are many things and people around the world that can threaten us.

Office Sweeties Have No Secrets, which is apparently news to some people. Now I can read the email of everyone in my office and find out every web site they visit when at work, if I wanted to, and if I could spare the time, but, quite frankly, there's a lot of other stuff I'd rather be reading.

This news from today's Metro, though a report with a smaller picture and more words is available online. In case you missed it (or can't be bothered to check out the link), some journalists found a page of doodles left by Tony Blair's seat after a press conference and handed the document to a graphologist, who concluded, among other things, that Blair was "unstable, under pressure and not a born leader." It was later discovered that the doodles were actually the work of Bill Gates. It is quite funny, I just wish I could believe it...

This nearly makes it into The Ranting Category, but I'm going to make an effort to be restrained and reflective. A thing I've noticed about people and queues is that, whenever they're queing for something they like to orient themselves so that they're facing the thing they're queuing for, and it's quite hard to persuade them to do otherwise. The prime example is cash machines - take a walk down Oxford Street any Saturday, fairly busy, people bustling up and down the street. Let me stress here - people bustle up and down the steet, bustling across the street tends to be far less common than people using the pavement to get from one end of Oxford Street to the other (diving into shops along the way). There are several cash machines along Oxford Street and it is quite common for someone to already be using one when you walk up, now when this happens the person waiting to use the machine ignores the fact that he's standing in the flow of pedestrian traffic on one of the busiest streets in England and stands directly behind the person already using the machine, facing towards it. The next person to come along repeats this and stands directly behind the person in front so that, gradually, a human wall builds up across the pavement. What amazes me is that people don't even think this is strange, in fact when I've queued to the side of a cash machine alongside the wall I often find that the person who joins the queue behind me will stand far enough away from the wall to be able to see the cash machine, and since I'm a fairly large person this can end up being quite a long way from the wall. And not just with cash machines, ticket machines at stations, hot dog stands, anything. So I wonder, do humans have some basic instinct that requires them always to be facing the thing they're queuing for, or do they just care so little about everyone else trying to use the street around them?

The tube combines an interesting inability to vent warm air to the outside, coupled with a cunning ability to let all the water in when it rains. If you are from warmer parts of the world and worried about the weather in London, rest assured that tropical conditions prevail at all times throughout the London Underground network.

My attention was drawn to this article today. Now here is a guy who hasn't thought things through properly. "He was keeping a journal of sorts to put together for future history," John Ellsworth told BBC News. "He wanted to make sure that his generation, as well as following generations, have actual words from somebody who was there." And yet if he knew his son was involved in such an important task you think the least he'd be able to do was not delete the emails he received, instead he is demanding Yahoo! release them on compassionate grounds. Why does Yahoo! have to be compassionate just because he couldn't be bothered to archive his own emails?

Not much going on here yet, but I plan to start spouting copious verbiage shortly. I'm sure everyone I know is bored of listening to me complain endlessly about the same things over an over, but I figure there's bound to be people on the internet who haven't heard me yet...