I've just had an idea that'll save the world

Well, not really. But it's a pretty darned good one at least. I'm pretty keen on renewable energy on the whole (although I do think that the appropriate near-to-mid-term strategy is nuclear), but there's a big problem with on-shore wind energy; that of siting the wind turbines. I personally think they're actually quite beautiful, elegant things, but I realise that that view isn't shared by everyone. Back in 2008, I went to Berlin for a conference, and on the flight over, I noticed that Germany has a heck of a lot of wind farms. The UK equivalent is golf courses. So... are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Mini windmills have been placed on crazy golf courses for a century and work brilliantly, increasing the fun of the game... so why not scale the whole thing up, produce some clean energy and make golf less dull all in one fell swoop?

I'll be waiting for notice of my knighthood to appear in my pidge...

Temporal effects on social acceptability

This is really an extension to a previous post from back near the start of this blog. I was hungry this morning and ended up going in to McCrap for breakfast (classy, I know). But while I was sat there eating my grease-in-a-muffin, I noticed a businessman in a suit, clearly on his way to a well-paying job, getting up and leaving. And that felt absolutely normal. But were that exact same man leaving that exact same (and I use the word cautiously) restaurant at 4pm, it would have seemed rather strange. At 11pm? Unthinkable. But at 9am on a weekday, McCrap is an huge mélange of different people. From the well-heeled businessmen, through the parents entertaining their young children all the way to the chavs and the homeless.

It seems odd to me that something that is perfectly acceptable can seem completely unthinkable just a few hours later. I can't think of any other examples off-hand, but I'm sure there must be loads...

English peculiarity

If you stand on a tube platform in London (or pretty much any train platform in the UK) and watch the people around you as a train comes in, you'll notice that people tend to start walking along the platform in the direction that the train is going in, almost as if they think that the train is going to overshoot the platform and they'll need to catch up to it. I'd always assumed that this is an odd psychological effect - that something in your subconscious tells you that this will improve efficiency (by moving in the direction you want eventually to be going) even though rationally you know that what matters is where you are currently standing with respect to the nearest door on the train and sometimes walking in the opposite direction would be better. But then I noticed that people don't do this in Paris - they'll just wait for the train to stop and work out which way they should go. And thinking about it, I don't remember anyone doing it in Germany or Switzerland either - or any other country that I've ever taken the train in. So what quirk of the English temperament makes us behave so strangely? I've absolutely no idea. But it's interesting at least!