A couple of entries for the diary
I’m in good mood today.
Well, you wanted to know the day to day ramblings of an old fart on the side of an Irish mountain?
On Sunday I built a bird table. That conjures up images of bench saws, drills and sawdust but sadly my days of intricate carpentry are past. It was a kit I bought a couple of months ago and I had left it lying around as it involved work, which I am a little allergic to. Anyhows on Sunday I was bored so I lathered the kitchen table with sheets of plastic and old bed sheets and sloshed wood preservative all over the kit parts. It was messy but fun. I then assembled it and stuck it outside with a dollop of bird seed in it. The birds of course ignored it. Ungrateful little shits.
Yesterday I went down to the village. The only excitement down there was that there was no excitement down there. It was lovely and peaceful. I had coffee and chats with friends while Penny got her chicken and got chatted up by a couple of women. I told you my life was uninteresting and there you are – uninteresting.
Today Herself phoned the Health Visitor who of course was at home. The news is good – she’ll be back with us next week. Apparently the Health Service had been banking on the Mandatory Vaccinations so they could forcibly inject her, but seeing as the gubmint saw sense [which is quite a remarkable achievement] they decided our Visitor can’t be held back for any sound reason and have to let her go. A nice little victory for the unvaccinated?
Yesterday the meeja had a bit of a celebration – Ireland topped the million Virus cases. That means one in five of us has had the bug. It’s getting closer. There have been a few cases in the village lately. The gubmint redesigned their “Covid website” for the umpteenth time. They have to be congratulated on the singular achievement of making the site worse each and every time.
And to wrap up [pun intended] I read that an energy company in the UK has come under fire [pun intended] for giving advice on keeping warm. Apparently all you have to do is cuddle a pet and play hula-hoops with the kids. What’s wrong with that? Though the pats may get a bit pissed off at being treated like a hot water bottle, and who the fuck has hula-hoops these days? I thought they went out of fashion over half a century ago? I hope people who keep ponies or snakes don’t take things too literally?
By the way, if any of you in the UK are feeling the cold, you can always come here and clean my house?
I am concerned about one of the bar charts on the Covid website. Looking at “Detailed Profile of Cases” it gives a breakdown by sex: 331,779 Male, 344,681 Female and 208 Unknown. It is rather worrying that doctors cannot determine the biological sex of a person.
In fairness, in these days of utter confusion about genders and all fifty or so variations and combinations, it’s possible the people themselves didn’t know?
What are you moaning about with the web-site? Other than it being a Government project and therefor useless as far as you are concerned. Enlighten us peasants please: what information would you like to see on it?
Where do I start? Well, it takes a hell of a lot longer to load, they have replaced clear line charts with bar charts and sections are completely behind the times. For example, the Detailed Profile was last updated on Christmas Eve? Are they still on their break?
Hey, it’s only the 11th of January. In public sector terms that’s still December 26th.
It loads just as fast as ever for me. Maybe its your computer where the problem resides.
Bar charts are used where these are best practice and line graphs where these are appropriate. Try a course on Statistics 101.
The Detailed Profile is only updated when the CSSO provides hard data as is clearly set out on that page. Would you rather have an up to the minute guess?
How would up to date guessing be any different from the rest of the information we receive?
All statistical models are guesses, it’s only that if you’ve got a degree, you’re allowed to call it a ‘model’ not a guess.
I’d settle for an up-to-date government.
…and a bad model is useless anyway because it doesn’t have all the right parameters. Similarly governments trying to micromanage.