pumpkinstrokemarrow

Pondering on my last post this morning (the other option being to get up), saw my mistake. Although one might avoid overflow by mapping the positive integers onto a short segment of the real line in the way described, there is no increase in precision. You need bytes to get precision. Which led to the interesting thought that an object which has a property age which can be detirmined by inspection of the object and which can take arbitarily large values, must itself be of arbitarily large size. One could cheat by sticking a label on the object and keeping the age index somewhere else - but then the index would get rather big instead. I think the conclusion, appropriate for a Sunday, has to be that souls do not have ages otherwise heaven would get very crowded. All this without a pint in sight!

Also thought of a catch with my pet scheme to save the planet (see 3rd October). I have just been reminded that road haulage companies are a fairly militant lot who seem to be able to bring the country to its knees in very short order - the position of strength that I suppose the railway unions were in before road haulage took off. On the last occasion, it was quite impressive how quickly petrol stations ran out of petrol - and how quickly they were up and running again when the strike was called off. The reminder was the haulage companies and farmers huffing and puffing about fuel prices - rising through natural causes. So what would they do if one pushed up prices by a good whack on purpose? Hav'n't yet thought of a way to soften the blow - the whole point of which is to reduce the consumption of oil and by implication the volume of road haulage. So my simple and attractive proposal falls, in the usual way of such things. Complexity is the order of the day. But perhaps the excelling (if not excellent) Ms Vadera can put her thinking cap on and come up with some complicated wheeze for her ex-colleagues at the Treasury.

Prompted by the latest report into how not to catch cancer (one can download all 537 pages of it for free), had another round of green lentils yesterday. Take a pound of lentils, wash then soak for a while. Boil for a while then add sliced carrot. Meanwhile fry up some fillet pork, bacon, garlic and onion in butter. Stir whole lot together and eat. Bit uncertain about the cancer score though. Pulses do very well, but one can also do very badly if they have been stored badly and have got a bit mouldy. Mould can cause all kinds of health disasters. Carrots, onions and garlic good. Then pork bad, butter very bad and bacon awful. And then we got through about 3 pints of the stuff and I imagine all abuse by volume is bad. But we rather enjoyed the meal.

And the DT had a good point. Are we addressing the right problem? Welfare for the old is already in a bit of a state because of our numbers and here we are dreaming up ways to increase the numbers. How long will it be before the nannies have us on compulsory fags to qualify us for access to support services? It's just plain greed living so long and soaking up so much of other peoples' dosh. Whatever would happen to the number of people in the world if the Chinese pack up fags and start living to be a hundred? Given that parts of China are quite cold in the winter I hate to think what that would do to global oil consumption and the knock-on effect on global warming.