Social – Page 13 – Fooyah

January 9 2021January 9 2021

Week One – Completed

Well, it’s all been rather busy hasn’t it? On Monday we were at work preparing for teaching in school and rolling out a testing programme, which doesn’t really work. Then, that evening, BJ told us that wasn’t happening. Such a shame that he didn’t do this three, or more, weeks ago and we mightn’t have had 1300 deaths yesterday. I do understand that this is all about balance. Keeping everyone sane and the money working while doing what you can for the ill. I mean, all of society is about the balance. How much are you willing to pay to help others is what it comes down to as far as I can see from over here on the left. “But it must be hard for anyone in that position” I hear mentioned – well, yes, but the indecision has caused so many deaths and another national lockdown. It’s like we elected a muppet to the most powerful position in this country and expected him to not behave like a muppet. On second thoughts that is exactly what we did, no simile needed.

You might be thinking why aren’t people as angry as me? Good question but we need to work out where you are getting your information about the angriness of the country. If it’s the print media and their online editions then remember that they are companies who push particular views because it suits their owners. Interesting that the Daily Mail moaned about Lewis Hamilton receiving a knighthood because he lives in Monaco for tax reasons and possibly the weather, when the owner of the DM is a non-domiciled Lord who runs his companies through various tax havens. By and large the print media love the easy going regulations that tories tend to put into place and so their messages follow that course. Just have a look at Brexit coverage or anything else to do with finance and try to look for biases. Along with natural pro-business anti-the-little-person these media also try to distract us from the horror of this country by creating outrage when there isn’t really any [Lewis Hamilton] or giving us a glimpse of side-boob. The honours system is a communication for another day, I’m not pro.

1325 – it didn't have to be this bad. I'm ashamed of this country.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 9, 2021

This week I’ve been working. I’ve been teaching live lessons online. It’s not the best way of teaching [no evidence for this] but it’s the best we can do in these situations [it didn’t have to be this bad, remember]. My back hurts from laptop work all day and my headaches have been low-level but constant. Such are the consequences of online learning etc. I’ll manage. I genuinely want the best for my pupils. In the many years I’ve had this site I haven’t written about work really. It’s been one of my “rules”. Things are strange enough now that I feel justified to do so, even if it’s only a little bit. My thoughts and views on my work place will remain that, mine. I’m happy to moan about national issues but there are limits to what people should write online about themselves. That, is almost comical given the stuff I put on here and twitter and my secret FB page and YouTube – but I suppose that’s all filtered to an extent as is this site.

If you are wondering where the album reviews are then they will return. It’s just the next few require a decent amount of writing because they are monster albums and I do that while listening to the album so I need the space and time to be able to do that. I’m looking forward to completing the album reviews because then I can go back and talk through the EBM and Aggrotech I’ve not written about. I’ve enlargened my music tastes and industrial electronic figures large in my choices at the moment. Metal is still there though I saw Slipknot about a year ago. Earlier today I paid for the latest single by Aesthetic Perfection it’s called S E X. On first listening it’s really good. Very AP. I suspect that over time I will still enjoy the song but the love for it will lessen as I think more complex songs that require a few listens to learn the patterns make the best long term songs.

January 3 2021January 3 2021

The Wrong Way Round

It’s just into the new year and I have tried to stay away from writing about this sort of this for most of last year but I need somewhere to let this stuff out and you are the people who I tell. I’ve mentioned before, many times, that this is a place for me to form my ideas and arguments. I’m not very good at that. I know what I think and I am quite convicted with those ideals, however I will change my mind once I see evidence that means I should. I don’t want to say I’m right about everything, I know I’m not, but I try to see things from a “do no harm” point of view. Right, disclaimers completed so here we go.

There is a lot of talk this morning about children’s education being affected by school closures. I want to consider that first. Yes, during the last national lockdown a lot of children struggled to keep up with the school work and a lot of children suffered mental health issues. If we look at the keeping up with the school work issue first there seems to be this idea that we have a fixed amount of things to teach pupils in schools. That’s not true. The reason people think like that is that they consider taking examinations, which by definition have a fixed content, to be the measure of schooling. This is bullshit. I can teach as much or as little as is required. We should look at the qualifications and change those. If we have teacher assessed grades for the next two years then it doesn’t matter if I fail to teach geometrical applications of vectors to my class. If an employed accepts someone who has a grade 8 in mathematics does the employer use that as a measure of that person’s ability to prove geometrical results using vectors or solving quadratic equations by completing the square? No, they do not. Employers use examination grades to give a measure of ability overall. Is that person good at mathematics? A teacher or centre assessed grade will still give that measure to employers, college or university.

STOP thinking that education is 200 things that pupils have to know before they leave school and start thinking about education as a process. Missing school for a few months doesn’t make kids any more stupid. It protects those in society from getting a dangerous virus that is KILLING 500 people a fucking day in this country.

Right, so I’ve fixed this concept of a fixed amount of education and we can use teachers to give grades so that society has a measure of the pupils we released to the wild. The next issue spoken about is that pupils need to be in school. The best place for young people is in school and I have some things to say about this.

Firstly, being in a supportive social environment is incredibly important to young people and mixing with others around their age is important. But the issue at stake here is that schools are where we force the rules of society onto people. It’s where we create the lifelong rules that people follow so that they fit into this current society. Late for school? Get punished. Mess around? Get punished. Swear at a teacher? Get punished. This societal requirement for school means that teachers and school staff do far more than educate children in the academic requirements of the world. We support the growth of young people and allow them to see different views and practice arguing and learning about how the world works. Schools are more than examination factories, we are places for creating future society because we don’t trust other people or families to do that well.

The mental health of our young people is incredibly important and schools form a massive part of giving meaning and a belonging to young people. Schools give structure to lives and help people develop. Having faced episodes of mental health issues in my life I am fully aware of how important good mental health and a supportive structure is to an individual. Rather than forcing society to rely on schools as a place of mental health support there should be much more of a support structure outside of school. The government admitting that we need pupils in schools for mental health reasons means that we have failed as a society to support our young people. If we require schools to do all these things then we are doing the bare minimum as a country. Pupils struggle without the support of school and I know children in supportive families who are having problems. The issue isn’t that schools are closed. The real issue is a lack of funding for support services outside of school and constant cuts over the last twelve years or more.

What sort of society do we live in where we are at the point of forcing schools to be open to support the economic activity of parents? Another reason being spouted for schools staying open is that parents can’t work if their kids are home. What sort of society have we created where the “family” unit can’t operate as a family and has to rely on state sponsored childcare? This is the government admitting that without teachers and schools taking your children off your hands for six hours a day then we can’t run economically as a country and that horrifies me. It would be nice to have the recognition that these are the things that schools perform for society. But recognition rarely comes.

So, to turn things around we need to do the following:

Change how our qualifications work to support real learning in schools rather than examination results being the result of children need to know these 200 things.
Pump money into bespoke services to look after the mental health of all people.
Pump money into creating a society that can cope economically without aspects of education always being open.

Now you can see the issues. Everything I have said, except removing public examination, will cost money. It’s a political choice.

Oh, by the way. I’m angry and have been for four years. But it’s getting worse. I’ve been shrugging all governmental responses off over the last year or so but I’m going through a phase of not being able to do that.

January 2 2021January 2 2021

43 x 47

New year new glasses or however the saying goes. Not a lot to say but I did think I should write something before playing some games. Let’s summarise what’s happening at the moment:

Weather – shit
Human rights – likely to be trampled
Pandemic – still really bad
Roaming charges – likely to return
Horrible people – still in charge
Scientific illiteracy – still high
Uncle Frank – still a racist

So, going well in the new year then. I think I might start another miniseries on YouTube this time flying different types of aircraft in X-Plane. I just need to find a nice place to fly a few circuits. I expect each video to be around five minutes long. I need to have a practice at some.

I don’t do resolutions but I am going to try and play a more varied selection of computer [or console] games this year. I have many games and I enjoy buying them but I rarely get through them. I have some suspicions about why this is and I will probably write about that some day. But, much like buying books, getting new games is exciting and I like owning things. I’ve solved the books buying issue by buying a Kindle and making sure that I read more things more often. I’m doing well at the moment. It helps not having loads of channels on the television because there aren’t that many things I want to watch. There will be even less once the NFL season finishes in about a month.

Anyway, we have to keep our hopes up that at some point this government will accidentally do something good and actually help people. At the moment they seem to be a bunch of art history students trying to understand that gravity exists. Which is probably what they are:

Boris Johnson – Classics Oxford, Eton
Rishi Sunak – PPE Oxford, Winchester College
Dominic Raab – Law Oxford, Dr Challanor’s Grammar [state school]
Priti Patel – Economics Keele, Westfield Technical College [state school]
Michael Gove – English Oxford, Robert Gordon’s College
Robert Buckland – Law Durham, St Michael’s School
Ben Wallace – Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Millfield
Matt Hancock – PPE Oxford, Kings School
Alok Sharma – Applied Physics and Electronics Salford, Presentation College
Elizabeth Truss – PPE Oxford, Roundhay School [state school]
Therese Coffey – Chemistry Oxford, St Mary’s College
Gavin Williamson – Social Science Bradford, Raincliffe School [state school]
George Eustice – Truro Cathedral School
Robert Jenrick – History Cambridge, Wolverhampton Grammar School
Grant Shapps – Business HND Manchester Polytechnic, Watford Grammar School [state school]
Brandon Lewis – Law Buckingham, Forest School
Alister Jack – Glenalmond College
Simon Hart – Radley College
Natalie Evans – Social and Political Sciences Cambridge, Henrietta Barnett School [state school]
Oliver Dowden – Law Cambridge, Parmiter’s School [state school]
Amanda Milling – Economics and statistics UCL, Moreton Hall School

December 31 2020February 23 2021

Testing The ‘Rona

I have spent the last few days angry and I expect it will continue. This government was, until yesterday, insisting that schools return for education and school stuff in the new year. This is while this country is ravaged by Covid-19. The numbers do not look good. The virus is rampant and the spike after christmas jollities will occur in a week when, once again, the government will act as though they don’t understand a two week delay to everything they introduce. They are incompetent and have always been. They lack the balls and empathy to do the right thing. I hear people say it must be difficult for people in charge and while I agree with that sentiment I feel those people are largely trying to find an excuse to forgive the tories from their utter ineptitude. The current bunch of politicians in charge of this country – and voted for by most of the country – are selfish pricks who don’t care about anything other than themselves.

There has been an insistence that schools must stay open whatever is happening and that education is really important. Wow. Given the lack of investment in schools and education over the last twelve years I’m surprised at this attitude. Maybe tories just don’t like their children and do everything they can to get them out of the house. I haven’t had a real term pay rise for over twelve years. Education has been underfunded for over twelve years. Just like the NHS the tories haven’t invested because of their policy of austerity over the last fucking decade.

So we should keep schools open but we don’t get the funding to do so. It’s like there is a belief that we should teach a fixed amount to the children and then test that “learning” or the whole system will fail. I don’t understand this rigid thought process. I can solve this now. Let teachers grade their pupils over the next two years. Cancel public examinations. Remove all forms of accountability by exam results. Let teachers give realistic grades to their students as a measure of how they have progressed and learnt over the last while. This removes the need for examinations, removes the need for all pupils to have learnt the same things and removes the need for keeping schools “open”. To be clear, when schools are closed the education is still happening. Teachers have upskilled immensely over the last year to do their best to deliver their passions and subjects online. Pupils motivation and parental support are always the biggest inhibitors to education – not what the schools or teachers do.

So, I’ve “fixed” education for you. Now you can put in policy to maintain the health of the nation and ensure that we work together to end this pandemic and get the disease under control. It is criminal that the number of deaths is as high as it is. The sheer ineptitude of the government should be enough to cause a revolution but that won’t happen in this country and that makes me sad. I don’t think there will be any accountability of this government for the deaths and illness. I think in four years when we have the next election there will be enough selfish people in this country to vote the tories back in. I am largely ashamed to live in such a selfish and racist country.

So, to testing. That is the point of this communication. I’ve read about testing for covid and I’ve decided to write this to get some handle on what it all means. This writing in my way of processing the information. So, some things to say first. There are different types of test and they aren’t all the same. If you test and get a positive it is likely you have the disease. If you test negative though it does not mean you are clear. Let’s see why. Testing relies on the virus replicating in your body enough so that there is lots of it in your saliva or snot. When you breathe or cough you expel tiny droplets and these are then absorbed by someone else, this is how this virus transmits. Also, we could leave virus particles on surfaces and other people then touch those surfaces and their mucus membranes. The current tests rely on either swabbing to see if your viral load is high or blood tests to see if you have developed blood cells that fight the disease.

The PCR test is the most accurate but takes time and money. They are almost 100% accurate if you have the disease. The false negative rate is low as long as you have some symptoms. It could be that you are infected but in the early stages and we know that it can take UP TO fourteen days for symptoms to first show. Therefore any negative doesn’t mean you are clear. All other types of Covid test are compared to PCR testing as it is highly accurate.

The Lateral Flow quick test has been hailed by the government and I suspect is the one being rolled out to schools for some fucking reason. Let’s look at the numbers involved with this test. Because it all comes down to probability and getting the numbers correct. The sensitivity [detecting the virus if you have it] ranges from 79% to 49% when those administering the tests range from laboratory scientists to tests performed by self-administration. We will use these numbers shortly.

The specificity of the lateral flow test [telling you that you are infected when you aren’t] runs at 0.4%. More accurately the specificity of the lateral flow test is 99.6%, it is a measure of how accurate the test is at being doubly wrong. So, if you aren’t infected there is a very good chance that you will get a negative result and only 0.4% of people who aren’t infected will be told they have the disease.

However, if you do have the ‘rona then the probabilities look far worse. The lateral flow test will miss around 50% of those people and declare them negative. This quite clearly shows that a negative result doesn’t mean you are negative. It doesn’t mean you can go visit grandma and it doesn’t mean you can go out. I’ve just read from UCL that up to 86% of carriers of SARS-Cov-2 virus might be asymptomatic. You need to have symptoms for the lateral flow test to work (ish), the lateral flow test will miss half of those infected and the rate is even worse if they are self-administered. This is not good news.

I’ve done some number crunching and it looks as though the probability of you testing negative even though you have the ‘rona could be as high as 25% [50% in some cases]. Oddly, maybe, this is an example of probability I teach sixth formers although I have to say I normally use the concept of a “terrorist detector” to show how immigration policies are bullshit. So, this all means that the government policy of using Lateral FLow Tests in large scale population preemptive testing is bollocks and won’t work. Just like everything else they have done this virus reaction won’t do what they think it will and be a waste of time and money and lives. If only they had paid attention to the Italians, Koreans and such like in the early days.

We all have a right to be very angry about the government’s response to this pandemic. We can acknowledge that it must be tough at the top but we can also acknowledge that they are doing an amazingly shit job of it. We are suffering and people are dying [500 a day] because the British public voted in a bunch of self-obsessed selfish losers who think it is their right to govern when, in reality, they are the worst possible group of people to lead us through this crisis. Fuck them.

I read a few articles to get this information but these were the main ones. Horizon Magazine of the EU research centre and also this one from UK Patient Site along with this one from the BMJ.

December 31 2020December 30 2020

FW3/22

I went along the river Medway for a walk in the cool temperatures and I wasn’t expecting to find a second world war relic. I mean, there are 17th century castles and defenses to save the British fleet from being destroyed [again] but something slightly more contemporary was a slight surprise. I also didn’t expect it to at an extreme slant!

I guess the photograph doesn’t make it look so bad but I will confess that standing inside [it didn’t smell of piss which was a surprise] made me feel quite disorientated with walls and floors at strange angles. I almost felt like I do when I wear the PSVR.

I think the above picture is pretty neat. I wasn’t expecting a family to be there but it works really well. So glad that I have a reasonable camera on my phone. I tried to avoid taking pictures of all the rubbish inside the pillbox.

St Mary's Island, Medway — St Mary’s Island, Medway

The river itself was very still, I think it was approaching high tide and there wasn’t that much wind. This meant I didn’t have to use a slow exposure to get a smoothing of the water.

God, it was nice to be out and somewhere else. To be somewhere where the limit of my view is more that about three metres. I do think that my eyes are suffering with this being stuck indoors quite a bit. Maybe I should get to taking tea in the garden more often. I think I could stand and stare at Bushey Wood.

December 27 2020December 27 2020

Make Decisions Now

All throughout this Covid crisis there doesn’t seem to have been much appreciation by the government that every decision they make will have a two to three week delay in any action that then occurs. This disease isn’t a quick-show-er, it takes a while to simmer and then it fucks your face. For the last month we have been experiencing five hundred deaths a day. The latest figures show a drop in that purely because it was Xmas and the paperwork will take a short while to fill out.

We also have news of the new variants of Covid going around and this isn’t that surprising. If you have a lot of genetic replication you get a lot of mutations and the ones that survive are those that manage to pass on more quickly. Not a surprise. More evidence for evolution you religious bigots.

It’s time for the government to make the choice and close schools for the next month. We had headlines in December about the biggest growth in the virus was secondary school age children, that wasn’t a surprise really. Schools have done everything they can to try to make their sites “covid-safe”. I would like to point out that much like “natural” in food advertising “covid-safe” doesn’t mean anything. All it does mean is that schools are trying to do their best to follow the rules set by the government [I do understand that some schools will be worse than others and there’s not a lot I can do about that]. You might be thinking that I would obviously want schools closed for the next month, but I am going to disappoint you. I would rather be in school, I recognise it’s the best place for kids, it’s where they get the best learning experience, it’s best for them mentally. Working at home is MUCH harder than being in school. Many of my colleagues suffered bad backs and necks from working online. I had nerve issues in my legs. Everyday I spent eight hours staring at a screen while trying to do the best I can to educate and look after the welfare of pupils. There comes a time when the government needs to recognise that schools are a hub of transmission vectors and they need to close for a while.

A NEGATIVE test doesn’t mean you are N EGATIVE.

The government publishes data regularly on it’s Coronavirus Site.

December 25 2020December 25 2020

Could Be A New Thing

After the launch of my YouTube series Minecraft Megaship 3000, I have been pondering other things. I quite enjoyed the challenge of creating those videos and maybe I should do more? I might try streaming on Twitch and I think it will be flight simulation based. I’m just trying to work out what I could do. I might even stream some Minecraft. Who knows?

There are two videos currently live. Another six will be released with episode three today at 1500. The last video covers a tour with a ray tracing resource pack, it’s worth watching all the others for. Happy Noodlemass.

December 24 2020October 1 2021

Machynlleth Tours

I spent a lovely time last night flying over the Welsh countryside with Mr O. We both have PCs capable of running X-Plane 11 and as we near the winter no-work-period it seemed sensible to try and fly together. While this is possible it is not easy. X-Plane has the ability to link up with another computer but only if you are on the LAN together. This is somewhat irritating. Also, it will only link up if the copies of all the sub-directories are exactly the same. This is not really a possibility as neither of us wanted to change our personal set up. So, the next thing was to find a solution from the world of the internet. There are a few after market add ons that will allow you to fly together but I didn’t want to pay money [I think I might make a donation] and I wanted the simplest set up. I found JoinFS a cross-platform tool to fly together over different sims! Also, as an advantage it is P2P and so doesn’t rely on an external network or server.

Two Ships Heading For The Mach Loop — T7 and Tonka Live Flying

After a while trying to set the software up and not reading the instructions, because who does that, we managed to get one aircraft showing in my sim although Mr O couldn’t see me. I think that’s because JoinFS works by “knowing” the type of aircraft you are in and telling the other machine what type of aircraft to show. My T-7 wasn’t categorised and so nothing showed up for Mr O. This wasn’t a problem and we proved the concept worked with a trip around the Mach Loop until Mr O crashed!

On the next attempt we both had Tonkas and heading out to the Loop from RAF Valley. It looks like there are some positioning issues as Mr O’s plane was partly sunk into the ground and his weapons rack was ten metres from where his plane was, but you know what, at least we could see each other on the tarmac.

In the previous picture you can see my Tonka, Mr O’s and also his weapons rack just off his starboard side. So we headed to the loop. I think we did OK. I guess we might need a bit more coordination on airspeeds and maintaining a distance but for a first go it was done well. I think we did about three tours around the loop. In this next picture you can just see Mr O flying with much bigger balls that me!

We both ran out of fuel at some point so we had to coordinate pausing the game and adjusting the settings to add more fuel to the planes. This worked fine for Mr O but when my cockpit lit up like Xmas and I had run out of fuel I only had one engine burning upon game restart. I couldn’t get the second engine started, but that didn’t matter, we still made it back to Valley and landed.

I look forward to the next flight. I just need to pick somewhere cool to fly. Maybe the Swiss Alps?

December 23 2020December 23 2020

So, I Did A Thing And Learnt Some Stuff

Early on in this pandemic that is fucking the world I started playing Minecraft pretty much so I could engage in conversations with my kids and understand a little about the world they were obsessed with. I still don’t know everything but I know what I like and enjoy and so I’ve been building. It gave me purpose. I hated it at times, having to head off to the farm to get wool or go and get supplies so I can make concrete. I considered making a squid farm at one point, but just changed my design to have less black concrete. I quite liked the process of building a thing and then changing my mind about what I wanted to to look like or how to complete a particular section. I would often think about what to do while I was running or working.

I haven’t done everything I want. There are things I kept thinking about that I could make to increase the complexity of the build and make it look even better. I wanted exhaust tubes to be built heading from the base of the launchpad up to the ground level around 100 blocks away and these would have smoke constantly pouring out of them to look as though the rocket was taking off. I wanted to build a launch control centre like the one at Kennedy for the Apollo launches but I only have so much time and there are other things I like doing. I’m not a complete obsessive!

Once I had done enough – I don’t think I should say finished – I tried to figure out the best way to save this build for posterity. I have the world save files backed up and stored on a NAS and in the cloud. But I wanted to be able to show this off I guess so I looked into making a YouTube walkthrough. Now, I have some rules about this website and I decided I should have rules about the videos. I wasn’t going to feature my ugly face, but I decided I would in the end. I have an opening title card – ha ha, created in MS Paint – yes it looks cheap but these are my first videos. Not sure what I’ll do next. I’ve been really impressed with the video recording software and I found it very intuitive. So, here is the first in the series, Episode 1 of Megaship 3000.

It turns out I can talk much better if I have wine and it amuses me how stilted and staccato my opening words are. I think I relax a little once I get going and know what to talk about. Many, many thanks to Penguin for giving me feedback on the first few attempts at a video and I would also like to thank the penguin chicks for their advice which, as seasoned YouTube watchers, was really good. I guess it’s now time to publicise my efforts and think about a release schedule! There are eight episodes in all and I guess, one day, I might do this again.