Be Excellent To Each Other

The Oxbridge students I've associated with have all be lovely people, and very bright.

Alex James, writing for The Sun, visits the factories and kitchens behind Greggs, McDonalds and KFC

I saw someone linked to this on Twitter, rolling their eyes at the comparisons with Michelin starred kitchens, so I clicked it expecting snobbery ahoy (I'm not much of a fan of Alex James, so was a little surprised that he came across so normal).

Also, Police help poor village cast off shit name, from Shanghai Daily.

There are more 'Situations wanted' adverts tghan in 'Situations vacant'. Which is nice. Still, by coming to the library, I saved myself 60p as the rest of the paper is as it ever is. In the Argus, I was pleased to learnt hat Bingley Railway station has half the crime of Shipley, so I can sleep safer now at night.

He's a decent enough bloke, it would appear. He has a permanent black mark for producing Chicken Tikka Massala flavoured cheese though.

ahaha, that's the kind of thing you say to a child who is doing ok at school. Well, not to tar all with the same brush, but the stereotype has held true at least in my experience.

Frankly I still think the standard of teaching at the open university is the best I've ever encountered. You get sent a shitload of books and material as part of your course fee, have access to extensive and consumate online resources, and most courses also do have regular seminars with support tutors to discuss what you're learning. Much cheaper than a standard university, and compared to the one I went to, much, much better. If I were an employer I'd rate a full Open degree just as highly as one from anywhere else, if not more so.

Relatedly, according to Mrs T, things seem to be getting very bad in the retail sector. Christmas wasn't as good as was hoped and sales have dropped off a cliff since then. La Senza buyout deal has fallen through, Arcadia group is closing a lot of its less profitable stores (Dorothy Perkins, Burtons etc...) Peacocks is going bust. Loads of people dropping of CVs in the shop on the off chance, and not just the usual student types. Well dressed middle aged women etc...

Not a good time to be in retail.

I've seen him on a few current affairs programs, and he has always come across as unbearably smug and affected, but that piece made him seem far less so.

I rate the OU quite highly, having read a fair amount of their course stuff. Old Man Afterthought got his MBA from there, and they have super awesome free online learning stuff, too.

YAY! Out for lunch with MrsA.
Boo! no meat.

The books are self-published by the OU and all completely relevant to the course too. None of this 'go out and buy this £100 textbook which you'll use a third of' bollocks.

Mali, why are you not eating meat?

The problem I have with that article, is not the content, it's the quality. It reads like a secondary school report on fast food factories.

So he can fit in his ballet costume.

One for Gaywood, the rise of personal computing.
http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-ri ... computing/

Dude, it's an article in The Sun; if their editors didn't go through it ironing out any complex sentences and multisyllable words then their readership would just gloss over it.

It's actually refreshing for its lack of pretentiousness, but it's not the quality of the writing that is of interest, but the attitude that these giant conveyor belts of mass food production are not always evil. Everything in moderation, and all that.

I can only comment on the science side, but in my first year I covered most of my friend did in his first 2 years (doing Physics at Warwick), as well as biochemistry (+ genetics) and geology. I had lectures & labs every day from 9am to 5pm, and 9-12 on Saturdays.
Also - there are no resits - if you fail an exam, you are out.

Check out this list
Looking at just people who actually graduated from there - Cambridge Uni has 65 nobel laureates, Oxford has 25, the next highest is the University of Manchester with 8.
There is some fairly hard evidence that these are the top universities in the UK.

Yup, the content is interesting, but seriously, the quality of writing is awful. I can't get past that and am actually shocked that quality is deemed ok, even in The Sun.

God help us all.

It's not even in any doubt. Without wanting to start an argument with Mr Gnomes, it seems more like sour grapes than anything, really.

As for knowing Oxbridge students who were up their own arses, I happen to have known minimum wage in-it-for-life supermarket workers who are up their own arses. I think that's more of a general "human thing" than what university they go to.

Those people potentially would still have been Nobel laureates had they gone somewhere else though. It could be that they have the highest number because they are the universities the best people go to, not because they produce the best people. Just as a correlation ≠ causation comment.

Or that nobel seelctions assign an unjustified weighting to the Universitys of potential candidates. Plenty of ways to look at that stat ;P

Unrelatedly, the BBC website makes me laugh. Earlier their main headline was:

JOHN PRESCOTT IN HACKING PAYOUT.

Then they realised Jude Law is a more famous and more interesting celebrity, and so now it reads:

JUDE LAW IN HACKING PAYOUT.

haha.

Indeed, but could it not also be argued that due to the consistent high standard of the students, the teaching can carry on at a higher level and quicker pace, therefore making the teaching environment and the "level of teaching" the best in the country? It's not just about how smart the teachers are. Though I'd be inclined to wager that the teachers are also top of their game, for exactly the same reason the students are.

However, being with better people generally makes people better.

Still better than Dan Brown.

So it's you lot that are holding me back!

To be fair, Law got more than three times Prescott's settlement (130k to 40k).

Apparently, so far 15 people have got £645k damages. Plus costs. 2012 is starting out costly for Murdoch.

The content might be interesting but is exactly what you'd expect to read in a Sun puff piece - promoting corporate interests, mega factories and factory farming and declaring it all to be "cool" and "awesome" without bothering to take more than a one dimensional look at any of it. Written by a 12 year old. It's a bit WTF.

Why's Alex James "writing for the Sun" about this?

I thought this. It's all like "Excellent!" and "Awesome!".. It reads like it was written by that character from the Fast Show who thought everything was "brilliant!"

He's their version of Praisebot?

Why the fuck is this floppy haired ex Blur member writing about sausage rolls for The Sun?

Surely this feature could have been better covered by a local beauty with ample baps.

I've been a support act to John Bishop a couple of times. He started at the same time as me, doing the same circuit. It felt like turning up to do a Battle of the Bands competition, all excited about the possibility of fame and fortune and finding yourself following some other new band calling themselves "The Beatles".

I think he is an awesome standup - and a really good bloke to boot.

The only issue is that his act relies on anecdote and personality. The problem is, he is is overexposed at the moment that the material can't keep up. Much of the first series of John Bishops Britain was a cleaned up (and shortened) version of his stage act which has been refined over ten years. (The story of him starting standup and the running the half marathon are masterpieces of comedy - it was fun seeing some subtle in-jokes put into the TV version.) He is a massively funny storyteller who needs a good couple of minutes to build up a head of steam. Once he has you rolling, he really has you rolling. Shoehorning him into Stargazing seemed wrong, especially as he couldn't have fun with the photo bits or banter with Dara or basically do any of the stuff he is good at.

(Similar with Jon Culshaw the night before, crowbarring a Brian Cox spoof at the start and then not letting him do any impressions. Not that I'm complaining in that case, but what was the point of having him there if he can't do his schtick?)

Got any handy vids of your stuff Plisk? I'd be interested to see it.

I took a quick look at that; unless I'm mistaken, there seem to be some rather shocking errors, although this obviously isn't my strongest suit!

Amiga in 1975?? I think not! (I assume they must be referring to the CBM PET, a very different animal indeed - no pun intended).

Also, I had a TRS-80 Model 1 in 1981 (second hand), my first computer. Fond memories of that old beast.

Edit: Who the hell was buying brand new Apple II micros in 1993? The mind boggles.

I've decided: it's because he's a corporate shill in the pay of Murdoch.



Agreed.

Erm, probably got some stuff in a drawer somewhere. More likely to have some audio. Although I could write a line, I was never much of a performer.

Your flimsy stereotypes are, unsurprisingly, utterly misguided.

For Oxford students: I encountered everyone from hard working normals from comprehensive to high-falutin' types with fathers on the boards of FTSE100 firms and £100k+ of private education behind them. Crucially, I typically didn't find out which was which until a long time after I met them -- and often, for casual acquaintances, I never found out. Not once, in the year I studied there, was I made to feel inadequate or second best for having been to a state-run Comprehensive.

As for the standards of teaching, I did one year of Physics at Oxford, then dropped out to do Physics/Computer Science joint honours at Cardiff. It wasn't until the third year of my Cardiff degree that I did any physics I hadn't done in Oxford, and I never touched a single mathematics techniques I didn't cover at Oxford either. At least in the physical sciences, Oxford covers ground at a mile-a-minute, and the collegiate tutorial system meant I spent four or five times more time with tutors than I did in Cardiff, and in smaller groups to boot. Typically in Oxford it was groups of one or two students, three or four times per week. In Cardiff, it was groups of four to five (in Physics) and a dozen or so (in Computer Science) once per week (I got two tutorials because I was joint honours, single honours students only had one).

So why am I glad I dropped out? Because Oxford's computer science course is, or at least was, a desultory joke, a pure maths degree that contains hardly any software engineering (Cambridge, I am told, does this better; and Oxford might do it better these days too). And computer science was ultimately the course that led to my PhD and my subsequent career, with which I am very happy.

There's also the matter of the fact I flat out wasn't good enough at Physics to keep up with the Oxford course; it kicked my arse, frankly. I was faced with the idea of doing four years solid, hard graft and leaving with a third (if I was lucky) from Oxford in a subject with dubious employment prospects [1] , or fucking off to Cardiff, doing subjects that interested me more and were far more vocational, and getting a 2:i. I chose the latter. It worked out for me.

You win a Nobel for research, not which University you went to in the (often quite distant) past.

I have, naturally, seen this already. It's fascinating though so it didn't hurt to see it again!

[1] in hindsight, I suppose I could have tried to go into the City and become a quant. I didn't know that then, and probably wouldn't have cared.

I knew you were warming to me. But before you get too incredulous, rememeber that in my very next post I said I wouldn't tar them all with the same brush, and merely that my personal experience held true with the stereotype.

I'm reliably informed* that journalists who work for the publications like that have to write down, and that's quite a tricky thing to do. I wouldn't call the standard of journalism terrible, but imagine being a professional writer and having to overly simply copy all the time.

*Yes, an ex-MrsA, kinda.

*simplify

You're fired.

Quick apostrophe question -



That's how it currently stands, but I can't decide whether to have apostrophes on both 'organisations' and 'individuals' or not.

I would say "yes".

Me, too.

I had a call from one of the girls that I met last year to say that a mutual friend of ours had the ambulance called to her new place after she was stabbed in the chest. Six stab wounds and the hospital gave her condition as 'critical', but I'm not sure what that means in hospital parlance. She's a lovely girl and was a big emotional support to me. The girl that phoned me has gone along to the hospital but nobody has been allowed in to see her yet. From what I understand her two year old seems also to have been in the room but is unharmed (physically).

Can't remember why I started to write this now. But there you go.

Bloody hell that's awful, hope your friend pulls through ok.

Bloody hell. Fingers crossed for her, Meems.

I'm really sorry to hear that. Hospitals always have a negative outlook on things, and tend to over dramtize terms, so don't fret over what they say.

Sorry to hear that Mimi, that sounds awful. I hope she pulls through okay.
There are some really terrible people out there.

It's a shite world.

Did anyone watch Deal or No Deal today? The girl that was on it was one of my friends from school.