ChristopherWhite.info/blog

At 5ft 10in, 12st 5lb and a 36E, she is keen to point out that the average UK woman is a size 16 like her.

She told Newsbeat: “I’ve always been bigger than most girls.

If this Miss England finalist is both average size and bigger than most girls there must be a handful of truly massive women unbalancing the weight distribution.

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Firstly, forgive the crudity of my methodology.

These have probably been up for some time, but I’ve just had a look at the overall results [scroll down a bit] collated from more than 25,000 people who took the Vote Match quiz before the London Mayoral election.

I then ran the archived version of the quiz, clicking “agree” for those issues with which a clear majority of particpants agree, “disagree” for those with which a clear majority of participants disagree and “neither” for those with a small difference (less than around 7%) between the two.

For which issues were considered important, I picked the top five — the table is ranked in order of importance.

Doing this gives the order of preference of candidates as follows:

While this isn’t entirely accurate, it does seem to lend weight to the idea that past electoral habits and/or the probability of victory are as big a factor in determining who to vote for as the parties’ actual policies are. More on this later.

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It’s often claimed that the number of foreign players playing in the Premier League has a detrimental effect on the English national team.

But the two teams contesting last night’s Euro 2008 final, Spain and Germany, have 41% and 51% of their respective domestic leagues made up of foreign players. The Premier League has 63%.

If the flood of foreign players into the domestic leagues did adversely affect a country’s national team’s performance, and a 10% difference in the number of foreign players only translated into a one-goal difference in international tournament success, would a further 12% really make so much greater a difference that a country wouldn’t even qualify?

Or is it more likely that England are just crap?

NB * In Italy (who lost a quarter-final to Spain on penalties), 36% of players in Serie A are foreign.
* You’d probably have to take account of the size of the countries’ native populations to look at this properly.

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I know graphology is an utter nonsense, but have a look at this:

This week, work sent me along to cover “Parliamentary Links Day” — it’s an event every year where the sciences’ learned societies (such as the organisers, the Royal Society of Chemistry) and professional institutions get together with a handful of MPs, mostly from the Innovation, Skills, Science and Technology Committee, or whatever absurdly long name it goes by.

Naturally, both party leaders are too busy to come. Both of them, and the Speaker of the House, sent letters of apology. These were their signatures:

It’s not clear in the scan, but Cameron’s was in blue — it’s clearly seen an actual pen at some point. I’m not sure whether Brown’s is a felt-tip held in a sword-grip or something emanating from MS Paint, but it’s clear to me that he just couldn’t be fucked. Thank you Gordon, your respect for the sciences is awesome.

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The Queen, better value than an iPod download

The Queen and the royal family cost each taxpayer 66p a year, an increase of 4p from 2007, Buckingham Palace accountants said today.

The accounts showed the cost of keeping the monarchy in the year to March 31 rose by £2m to £40m. Officials said this was 3.1% lower in real terms than in 2001.

The per person expenditure each year was said to be just under the cost of two pints of milk and or an iPod download.

Cheaper, yes. But not necessarily better value.

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“The US has removed its nuclear weapons from Britain, ending a contentious presence spanning more than half a century, a report will say today. According to the study by the Federation of American Scientists, the last 110 American nuclear weapons on UK soil were withdrawn from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on the orders of President George Bush.”

He’s probably scared we’ll leave one on a train.

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I see that this attempt to force the referendum that we were promised on the Lisbon treaty has failed.

What’s perhaps most annoying is this:

“Wheeler argued that the public had a “legitimate expectation” that there would be a referendum because Labour promised a referendum on the EU constitution in its 2005 election manifesto and because the Lisbon treaty was very similar to the constitution.

“But, in their ruling, the judges said that the constitution and the Lisbon treaty were not the same.“

[My emphasis.]

Given that, as Labour backbencher Ian Davidson pointed out during Parliament’s “debate” on whether to bother with a referendum, the decision to include the commitment to a referendum in Labour’s 2005 manifesto was made before they knew what the (then-) constitution would contain, isn’t the difference between the proposed constitution and the Lisbon treaty completely irrelevant?

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I handed in my notice at work the other day. I’ve only been at Campaign for seven weeks.

Understandably, they weren’t best pleased.

“I don’t think you’ve behaved very well,” my editor said, and perhaps she has a point¹.Certainly were I in her position I’d hit the fucking roof. And yet at the same time, if I were ever in a situation where an employee showed up one day and told me they’d turned down a job paying over 50% more than their current salary (and particularly one that’s within their area of interest/expertise²), I’d be half-tempted to fire them for being a gibbering idiot.

But a thought occurred last night: for all the talk in some circles about nasty businesses exploiting their workers, employees leaving, at some point, for something better or better-paid is actually expected. The equivalent from the company – firing an employee simply to replace them with someone better/cheaper/faster – is at the very least frowned upon and probably constitutes unfair dismissal³.

_ _ _
1 Mind you, she doesn’t know this was the second interview I’d had since starting at Campaign -– both for jobs I’d applied for before applying for this one, however. The first was for a science writing job on The ENDS Report for which I’d had to return the writing test by the day I started at Campaign. At the time (as I was re-leaving home) my dad also seemed to frown upon my willingness to change jobs so readily, but he’d begun work in an age where reciprocal loyalty between employee and employer was a given –- ironic since most of the industry in town, which will soon come to include his employers, has pissed off abroad.
2 As the assistant editor of Interactions, the Institute of Physics’s newspaper.
3 Though not after seven weeks, obviously

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A “monkey’s heid” he may have, but he’s right about one thing:

Former Manchester City, Sunderland and Leeds boss Peter Reid has called for Fabio Capello to make Steven Gerrard the permanent England captain.

Reid, who will take charge of the England Legends against Scotland Legends live on ITV4 at Southampton tomorrow (Thursday 15 May), says the Liverpool skipper has the same qualities as England’s iconic Captain Marvel, Bryan Robson. Robson will be captaining the Legends team.

Speaking ahead of the game, Reid said: “There’s different types of captains but I think the inspirational ones in the middle of the park, like Robson, like Gerrard, galvanize the team when they need galvanizing.

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Likes to starve Africans, apparently.

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