Foreign Perspectives

Isn’t it amazing at what a relatively small amount of natural pollution can do?

Whilst we all knew that Iceland was covered in ice, volcanoes and lava, very few people gave it much thought aside from when their banks all went bust. Why should they? After all, it’s a tiny place quite a long way from anywhere. However, now that just one of their volcanoes has erupted we find that northern Europe is basically set back 50 years in terms of travel and with no end in sight. Despite all the advances in modern technology (or rather because of them) there doesn’t seem to be any easy short term solution.

Will this make any difference to global warming? Yes, but probably not a whole lot but then this is just one volcano.

Listening to some people talk about how it’s affected them, it’s quite laughable how far they expect the airlines go in helping them. One lady on this morning was wailing about her severely disabled being stranded in Paris after a Eurodisney trip. The airline had provided accommodation for one night but said that was all they’d do. Presumably that one night was more than enough to sort out alternative travel arrangements: after all, Paris is pretty much the hub of the French travel system so there’s no shortage of means to get to and from it. The disability thing was stressed as medication was needed yet there’s no shortage of medicine, doctors or medical facilities in Paris. Granted, it’s a nuisance and a major one to be stranded like this but planes aren’t the only means of getting about and getting “stranded” in a major European city is hardly the disaster that some people make out.

It’s been a very long time since we had the opportunity to view how the use of a wide range of products changes when the price of them goes down.

Sure, we’ve been used to that happening on all kinds of electrical and electronic items with computers almost dropping to the fashion item price range (hence the arrival of colour choice recently of course). However, who’d have thought of that very same thing happening to something like eyeglasses?

That’s a product that’s historically been seen as involving highly trained opticians, expensive offices and skilled technicians which overall seemed very much like a recipe for high prices as far as you could see. Except that online retailers like ZunniOptical are changing all that with prices at the bottom end of the range (which don’t look like el cheapo glasses by any means) coming in for pretty much loose change.

Clearly when a product drops into that “loose change” price range from previously having sat well in the “fairly serious money” price range then there’s going to be big changes in how it’s perceived and used. For one thing, the concept of having a single pair of glasses purely because it wouldn’t be worthwhile to have more than one pair doesn’t hold any more. Thus, even at the lowest price there is heaps of choice and the opportunity to match your glasses to your outfit in a way that wouldn’t have been viable before.

I wonder what’ll be the next product that this will happen to?

Over the last year that Mum’s spent with us we’ve really began to notice that she’s slipping into old age and sometimes it seems that she’s doing it at quite an alarming rate.

For instance, in 2008 we all went on holiday to Venice and she was able, with not too much difficulty, to follow us round. Granted, not at a fantastic speed, but she managed it. Just over a year later it’s obvious that she’d have no chance of being able to do that as her walking ability has dropped dramatically in the last year.

She’s also gotten into the habit of repeating things that can get seriously annoying at times. We don’t really need to know that it’s rainy/sunny/whatever every 10 minutes or so! Whether she’s been doing that for a while is difficult to say as she wasn’t with us constantly before 2008 and indeed with us being over in France for the previous five years we didn’t get the chance to notice that anyway.

Related to that is the forgetfulness or rather the losing of the sense of time. On Saturday she was all set to go to church for instance. That’s fairly new though but I guess it’s something else that we’ll notice more as time goes on.

She’s not “old” generally but seems to be heading that way going by some of the things that we’ve been seeing.

Everybody know that this limits the maximum working time to 48 hours a week but it covers rather more than that.

To begin with that 48 hours is an average usually over 17 weeks but that can be extended up to 52 weeks in some circumstances. Thus you could, in principle, be working, say, 60 hours for several weeks at a stretch yet still remain within the limits of the directive which I suspect is probably not what many people would think the directive allows.

In addition to the limits on the working week there’s also mandatory rest breaks. Work 6 hours or more and you must have a 20 minute break. For each 24 hour period you must get at least 11 consecutive hours of rest thus the maximum working day is effectively 13 hours. Finally you must have a minimum of a 24 hour break each week (or 48 hours per fortnight) ie you can only work 6 days a week on average.

For night time workers (ie those working at least three hours between midnight and 5am) there’s a few more rules including the right to a free health assessment and a maximum of an average of 8 hours per 24 hour period.

Finally, you’re entitled to a minimum of 4 weeks annual holiday.

So there’s quite a bit more to it than “a 48 hour week” and quite a lot of areas where it doesn’t work quite as you might expect. For instance, if you’re on-call then that only counts fully towards the 48 hours if you have to be in work: work from home and only the actual working time itself counts.

I’d both the astronomy and human biology assignments back in the same post yesterday.

As it’s the first of the astronomy assignments I’d really no idea what to expect. It’s been a long, long time since I did any kind of physics course so I wasn’t quite sure how best to approach it all. What I did was take on board the comments from the previous biology assignments which certainly seemed to have helped some in that the mark came out at 79% which is a nice start for sure.

Funnily enough, the biology weighed in at 74% though I suppose a slightly lower mark isn’t a great surprise in that it was the last TMA I did after some four weeks solid of doing them so I was a bit worn out with them all.

What was interesting was that the astronomy assignment was much more difficult to do than the biology ones have been. Since I have quite a background in physics/astronomy I was expecting that the astronomy assignments would be fairly easy going in comparison to the biology ones yet, to date, the reverse has been the case. Oddly, I’m finding the biology course much more interesting to do as well.

Since there’s only one biology assignment to be done the assessment calculator is at it’s most interesting in respect of “substitution” scores. It turns out that even if I don’t do that final one I would pick up 56% overall on the assignments which isn’t bad although doing the final assignment should raise that to something in the 70s. As always, I still wonder how “real” the assignment marks are at this point ie will my exam mark reflect the marks I’ve received in the assignments? In recent years, the exam mark has ended up within a few percent of the TMA average (previously there used to be quite a difference) so that’s reassuring though this’ll be the first science exam I’ve done for many years.