I’m an old IT pro. Co-mum to Tig and Freddie, rescued Border Collies x Welsh Sheepdogs. They are the latest of our greatly loved and now hugely missed dogs.
They enoble the likes of Michelle Mone after she nicked millions from the public purse during the pandemic and go after unpaid carers who may have claimed too much of a paltry benefit when they save the UK billions 🤬
Chemistry is like physics where the particles have personalities - and chemists love talking about the really nasty ones. It makes for fun reading, like Derek Lowe's column "Things I Won't Work With". For example, bromine compounds:
"Most any working chemist will immediately recognize bromine because we don't commonly encounter too many opaque red liquids with a fog of corrosive orange fumes above them in the container. Which is good."
And that's just plain bromine. Then we get compounds like bromine fluorine dioxide.
"You have now prepared the colorless solid bromine fluorine dioxide. What to do with it? Well, what you don't do is let it warm up too far past +10C, because it's almost certainly going to explode. Keep that phrase in mind, it's going to come in handy in this sort of work. Prof. Seppelt, as the first person with a reliable supply of the pure stuff, set forth to react it with a whole list of things and has produced a whole string of weird compounds with brow-furrowing crystal structures. I don't even know what to call these beasts."
The Gambling Industry Is Wrecking Our Mental Health
Online betting apps are making it easier than ever to lose money and develop gambling disorders. Any serious attempt to improve mental health means taking on the predatory companies profiting from addiction
The HoC Public Accounts Comm. has concluded the civil service lack both skills & capacity to property oversee infrastructure projects contributing both to the evident delays & budgeting problems.
Civil servants have become too reliant on outsourced expertise (consultants & the contractors) for evaluation, with the state no longer able to act as an 'intelligent client'.
The Tory attrition and politicisation of the civil service has (and is having) sigficant detrimental impact.
Much longer than that...I was a PwC senior IT management consultant from 1989-1994 and I did a lot of puclic sector work at a fee of >£1,000 + expenses per day.
I met my wife, Caroline, in 1990 on a job at London Borough of Tower Hamlets implementing the Local Government Act 1988 (which extended CCT to blue-collar services, such as refuse collection and ground maintenance, and white-collar services such as public libraries and arts centre management).
I was adopted in the UK in 1956 when I was 6 weeks old.
I must an oddball, but I’ve never thought very much about all this 🤷
My view has always been that my birth mother chose to let me go, possibly because of her family’s pressure. From that time my interest in her, my birth father, and their families died.
I’ve gained a good education, had interesting work, and made a good life with my wife. For me, that’s what matters. I can’t influence anything else 🤷
Beat the queues: secure a table in The Vulcan Hotel with a pre-booked beer flight, showcasing 1/3 of a pint tasters of the three Vulcan beers produced for us by Glamorgan Brewing Co, or enjoy a Hartsease Farm Sparkling Traditional Lemonade.
