eddie-brown.net blog

Via the register, The chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life has been saying that e-voting might not be such a good idea. Yes, it makes it easier to vote. And the pilots show there were more votes cast, but are those votes legitimate?

The full text of his speech is online as a word document.

Kids and Booze crops up as a discussion point quite often. And it is always amazing how many people don’t realise that the law is a lot more complicated than “no alcohol till over 18″

The Direct Gov website has some guidance on alcohol, young people, and the law. It says what i thought it would say, to be honest….

I had a fridge. We had used it in our temporary home during our migration North. But since we purchased a fridge and a freezer over Christmas and they arrived, the old fridge has sat in the garage.

I was going to ebay the fridge. But frankly, I was not sure i could be bothered with it. After all, with work going the way it is, there is plenty of opportunity for me to change spare time into money, if that is my driver. and this does mean i know the monetary value of my time.

So I thought about other ways of disposing of the fridge. One method would just be to take it to the tip. Or on the other hand, I could just give it away, and FreeCycle it. Once i had joined the local (yahoo) group, sending an email resulted in responses from people who would like a new (to them) fridge. then just arrange for one of them to po round and pick it up…. and off it had gone.

Hmm, so I was reading a post on uk.rec.scouting where a leader or 2 mentioned that scouts had been elected to this youth parliament thing. And started wondering if the figures do imply that scouts seem to be more involved in “Success”

Last year the Scout Association reported 358,475 youth members (not including as youth members those leaders who are also counted as Network due to being under 25)

I couldn’t find up-to-date numbers for the population of the UK, but i found some figures for 2000 which gave 14,792,000 people aged 5 to 25. I guess population rises in time? or maybe does not change too much?

This gives 2.5% of the population being scouts.

But then i suppose many people are not members for the full time… Helpfully, we could compare figures for scouts (99,403) with those 10-14 (3,848,900) and thus again 2.5% are members. (proportionally membership is highest in the 8-10 age bracket.)

So why do a disproportionally high number of people that I meet doing stuff, and/or making something of themselves seem to be/have been scouts?

I wonder if scouts is having an effect on people, or if the membership of scouting is effectively self selecting to a certain type of person.

As an aside I can think of people who were involved in stuff at uni who had not been scouts. but were members of other organisations instead….

The other weekend, I was out and about on the hills with a bunch of scouts we are training for a challenge in a little over a month’s time.

My Pack weighed far too much. It was easy to carry, but it still should not have weighed 17kg. especially when the scouts were only carrying 9kg each. Even if i was being self sufficient.

I think it is time i learnt a few lessons, I have been looking around at how I could reduce my pack weight. the main thing so far is to ditch the tent. Then i will have to look at cooking. And then I think the rucksack (as my 65L weighs almost 2kg all by itself….)

Backpacking Lite has some really good information on it. I think the only thing it is missing is details of what foods to eat, to both keep the weight down, and the calories/nourishment up.

I have just discovered the value of army rat packs. They are Heavy (as they are not dehydrated) when compared to the dehydrated meals one can buy, but I think the quality is so much better. (no dry un-rehydrated bits in them for starters….) and all you have to do is sit them in water coming to the boil whilst you are pitching your camp, and then eat them straight out of the packet. I think in summer on fine warm evenings I can be bothered to cook, but on a cold wet evening boiling in the bag is going to be so much more rewarding.

I’ll be trying out a khyam bivi bag on winter camp in 2 weeks time… we will soon see who breathable they are….

Updated: The Khyam Bivi Bag Link

Let me get this right.

It is snowing right now. Its actually white on the ground. So tomorrow we are taking our scouts to Xscape to go (amongst other things) tobogganing.

Hmmmmm.

I am still not amused about what the telegraph is making out to be the possibility of social engineering of university admissions.

I should have thought it was obvious. University is for bright people. Universities should be selecting the best people for their courses, not trying to admit some pre determined quota of people due to social/racial/sex reasons.

If you find that some section of society are under represented at university, then perhaps the right thing would be to teach them to spell/count (depending on whether you want them to do English or Engineering of course) and make it so that they can afford to go.

Then again, maybe you should re assess the point of making them pay to just get a worthless bit of paper.