cloudsoup

How it could have maybe been by Helen

Melvyn’s excellent R4 programme, ‘In Our Time’ covered the history or Carthage on Thursday. Interesting stuff. Here’s Dido’s Lament

Tim Worstall at the ASI rails against the idiocy of the suggestion that flights could be rationed. I took the  link to the Telegraph report and read the following:

He said there was “no reason at all why people should fly around the UK” and that domestic flights should be taxed almost out of existence.

Now I’ve not taken many domestic flights but when I lived and worked in Newcastle upon Tyne I was able to fly up to Aberdeen to ovesee the setting-up of a new software system my team had built for BP and I also flew down to Southampton for a meeting. In both cases alternative travel would have taken another day and the extra cost to my company would have been whatever my daily chargeable rate was at the time. So my comfort and convenience aside, there is certainly a reason to fly even in the UK. Whether that reason is of such value to me or my business can be determined through carbon taxes.

Gordon Brown’s just returned – by air – from the talking shop of Davos. Does anyone think his journeys will be rationed?

View Larger Map

Gordon Brown could have travelled to Davos by car

Not so long ago I worked with a woman who, returning to work after maternity leave, declared her baby would not be receiving the MMR jab because she knew it caused autism.

This pernicious and oddly British myth has been persisted by an ill-informed  LBC Presenter, Jeni Barnett and when Ben Goldacre of the Bad Science blog published a 20 44 minutes excerpt from the 3-hr show to illustrate the stupidity and ignrance of the anti-vaccination crowd he was hit with a legal threat from LBC’s lawyers.

The story’s gone viral and now the Streisand effect kicks in. Full transcripts are appearing all over the web and Wikileaks has the mp3.

Goldacre says,

It is my view that Jeni Barnett torpedoes her reputation in that audio excerpt so effectively that little explanation is needed

and I can’t disagree.