From July to December

I believe that yesterday, after some problems getting the stupid post to publish on time, I had just finished June. Over the last 16 years, I've noticed that June is usually followed by July so we may as well follow that pattern here.


July was of course in the summer holidays. I alternated between lazing around, buying stuff on eBay and occasionally producing something of merit. I went driving for the first time at that off-road place that'll show you the basics before you can go on the road. Sam and I went a couple of times but I didn't enjoy it much and I thought it was a waste. Now I have a copy of the Highway Code sitting on my floor and I'm going to need to start reading it at the beginning of February.

July was also when I first received the NESi along with a load of other eBay stuff as Sam and I entered our seasonal pattern of buying loads of crap to tinker with in the summer. We still need to sell those NESi, along with... well, the loads of crap we bought to tinker with and never used.


August... More of the same, really. Summer would have been drawing to a close but the only truly significant event to differentiate it from July and the couple of holiday days in June was that I got my exam results. Despite my confidence at the time and my A in the prelim, I somehow managed only a C in English. I hadn't been expecting to do brilliantly but given my track record I thought I would manage a B at least.

Fortunately, it turned out that I wasn't alone. Many of my classmates and, indeed, many students around the whole of Scotland had got English results that were much lower than they or there teachers had predicted. The teachers said that they were doing their best and that the course was useless and the SQA said that the course was fine and the teachers were useless.

I'm paraphrasing slightly but over the next few weeks and months, the slagging match subsided and a couple of official investigations were launched. I eventually got up to a B on appeal which seems to have served me fine, looking at my university offers, but I know a lot of people who got really screwed over by that exam and none of the investigations and changes for the future were going to fix that.


We returned to school in the last few days of August but most of the interesting stuff took place in September. Those first few days, all we had was a beaten up old SNES that we used for huge Street Fighter II tournaments. The class hadn't divided itself up into rooms as it has now. I know this was only a few months ago but it all seems so strange.

September was also when we first had to start thinking seriously about university applications. I'd always had some ideas about doing Computer Science but I really didn't know where or even if I definitely wanted to do it at all. Nevertheless, I made some progress towards making choices and writing my personal statement.

That month was also when I first made some posts on Corbett's Fiction. Unsurprisingly, I've done almost nothing since then. I suppose the concepts have become a bit clearer in my head if that's any help.


All these recent months now begin to blur together so I get the feeling that I'm going to have to refer to a lot of posts from October to get my facts and memories straight. Don't expect me to link to them; that's far too much like hard work.

So many things happened then that seem so long ago... I apparently got my new chair then but I'm so used to it now that it seems like it's always been here. It was Erin's birthday and so we used Citizen Cane again. You know, I think I forgot to mention that big ol' cane anywhere else? Looking back it seems we built him in March. It felt so much more recent than that...


Moving on, it was in late November that I had my surgery. That's still bugging me now but, again, the surgery seems so distant. I'm not sure why. We had our annual fireworks party in November as well. I remember talking to Sam a lot because I didn't like anybody else there. We watched The Muppet Show while everyone else was downstairs eating a meal together, proving once again how anti-social and geeky we are. Oh, and after a long wait, both in a queue outside the store and in the many months beforehand, I got my iPhone. Well worth it, I believe.


December... do I even really need to go into that? Last week and a bit of term, if memory serves; not much going on – watched some films in the common room, cleared out the common room, went to last ever Christmas service, went home, had holidays, had Christmas, ended up here, doing this.

That's pretty much it.


And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my year. It seems like there's a lot I haven't mentioned - going to the computer club each week and helping out the kids there. Sam finally asking out that girl he'd had a crush on for months. All the stuff we did to Jimerson's locker.

It's strange how my recent memory blurs together. Perhaps I only remember the best bits in the long term, making the short term feel a lot more cluttered and connected. Major events like picking a university and doing projects each take so much time that I can't put a precise date to them or relate the details of a single event.

Maybe it was a mistake to go through the year chronologically rather than just think of the highlights. I think tomorrow I'll pick out my favourite bits and put off sharing my resolutions until January 1st.

Yes, that sounds like a plan.

From January to June

I said I was going to do something where I looked back on the year, didn't I? Well, I've got nothing better to do, I guess.


January seems like a good place to start. I expect that at that time I was still getting to grips with my new iMac, as strange as that may seem now that my Mighty Mouse feels like an extra limb. I can't remember what games and so on I would've been playing at the time. It wouldn't have been too long after the release of the Wii and my acquisition of one, so I might have still been playing Twilight Princess. I could have finished it, but I recall I was still thinking about it and discussing it as it took Sam a lot longer to do.


February brought with it my Higher prelims, in which I managed to get all As. Somehow. I do recall that English was rather close but it was the same for everyone else who got an A in my class so we just assumed it was a really hard prelim. Oh, if only we had known what was to come.

It must have been sometime in February that Skippy suggested that we start doing a blog together. I'd had various ideas and projects swirling around in my head for months by then but I was having trouble actually following through so I agreed in order to prove to myself that I could keep something like that going. We put it off until after the prelims, at which point Skippy sent me a rough draft of an introductory post. I almost completely rewrote it and then published it in late February.


My regular posting didn't start until the 1st of March, when I challenged myself to keep up daily posts on a variety of topics for exactly one year. So far, I've made a pretty good job of that, I think. Skimming over some of those posts now, they seem to be a bit more light-hearted and relaxed than what I write now. I can't be sure, although one of these days I'm going to read through everything I've written here and find out for certain how it's changed.

March was the month I went up to Edinburgh to do a Chemistry competition of some kind. I'd completely forgotten about it until I read up on it right now. I've forgotten a lot of what happened in Chemistry, since I dropped it before going into Sixth Year. English, the other subject I dropped, and a whole lot of other stuff that happened in S5 seems like the distant past now. I'm not sure why.

Oh, and it was in March that I was playing the first Phoenix Wright game as well, having borrowed it from Sam... It's still on my shelf.


April... April... what happened then? Easter holidays, I suppose, and the build-up to the exams in May. I went through my general gripes about holidays though I did concede that that particular one had been quite fun – especially the bits that didn't involve anything that holidays are generally supposed to involve. While away, I made fun of the Street Fighter movie and watched House and then when I got back I had to panic about doing holiday homework.

It's remarkable how similar all my holidays from school turn out to be.


May held the dreaded Higher exams. I can distinctly recall the day before the English exam: I spent it lying on the bed in the guest room, highlighted chunks from essays and pages of quotes lying around me and my DS in sleep mode at my side. I somehow found the mental strength to study for most of the day, occasional snatches of Final Fantasy III the only thing keeping me sane.

As far as I knew, the English exam itself went fine. That afternoon, I headed into town with Sam and Sam to pick up imported copies of the new Pokemon games. We'd planned to spend the rest of the day there but it began bucketing down so we headed back to the school, hoping it would pass while we found shelter. It eventually did but by that time Potter had already started jogging home and Stafford and I had called my mum to come and pick us up. It sounds fairly miserable but it was a fun experience.

Interestingly, I suspect it may have been that brief stint of getting caught in the rain with Stafford's infamously unreliable mobile phone my only lifeline that truly convinced me I needed a phone of my own.

The rest of the exams... I don't have such clear memories of. I recall going down to the play park near the school several times and I think that that was this year. It might have been at Standard Grade, when we also did it. Who knows? I'm slightly annoyed that the exams next year, with their greater length and my smaller classes, aren't likely to lead to a similar situation of giving up revision en masse in order to play on swings.


With exams out of the way, June was a breath of fresh air. It also seems so very long ago, when we were trapped in that strange limbo between Fifth and Sixth Year, using our old form rooms but having three study periods a day and spending half of them just lying outside on the grass. That was absolutely fantastic. I think we eventually got told to stop but I can't remember if we actually did.

Then came the end of the term and the last time I would see certain classmates and teachers. I remember Speech Day being held in a local sports hall instead of the town hall, which was being renovated. I went up to collect my prize then I just went back down to my seat to sit through the proceedings. Luck and random chance had placed me next to my two best friends so I was able to pass the time talking to them. Well, during the rehearsals and before the event itself anyway.

At the end, I suppose the departing Sixth Year would have been doing what the departing Sixth Year always do, though I can't recall seeing them directly. They would have been hugging each other and some would have been crying. For many years, I'd never really understood why – I knew they were leaving but the friends would stay in touch. Now, I think I have some better idea.

That'll be me in six months. I doubt I'll be hugging anyone or crying but I'm honestly not sure how I'll handle that final moment of school life, knowing that I'll never again share a classroom with that diverse bunch of people, some of whom I've known for most of my life. Sure, I'll keep in touch with my friends and there's a good number I'll be glad never to see again but it's those ones in between that just sort of make up the background of my life without being close...

I'm not quite sure how to express it. I hope I'll have found a way in six months time. Even if the challenge I started in March has come to a close, I'll still keep putting my thoughts up here and, well, there'll be a lot of stuff going on then that'll give me some interesting thoughts.


And that's half of the year done in over 1200 words. Tomorrow, I'll do the other half and then New Year's Eve will give me some time for reflection and resolutions.


You know what? I feel good. I'll leave it to you to imagine why.

2141 words on why you shouldn't believe everything you see on TV

Well, I got it up even if, with 10 minutes to go, I don't have time to go through and check it for spelling, coherency, logic, etc. I call that the "TV Science Approach".

I'm not sure if any of you saw the episode of Panorama on BBC 1, which I mentioned yesterday and the day before. If you had (or even if you hadn't and had simply noticed the various articles about it that showed up in various places), you'd know that it was about fears and concerns over "radiation" emitted by Wi-Fi technology and how it's going to kill all your children, etcetera, etcetera.

Before I continue, I'd like to point out just how loosely the term "radiation" is used in the program. It's used to refer to any signal coming from a Wi-Fi source and mobile phones and is never accompanied by words such as "electromagnetic" or replaced with something like "radio waves". Because in TV land, radiation is always something dangerous and always glows green. Even when the deadly phlebotinum radiation doesn't come into contact with humans, it creates things like Godzilla. Do you want Godzilla created in your child's classroom? Do you want your kids eaten by Godzilla?! Do you?!?!!

Of course, anyone with a basic knowledge of science or physics can tell you that the term "radiation" covers a very broad spectrum of things, including the electromagnetic spectrum of things, which also includes harmless visible light, not to mention infrared and all the TV and radio waves which are filling the air around you. Panorama isn't technically wrong with it's description of radiation being given off by Wi-Fi, but you can't help but feel that they're hardly taking a balanced view of the debate.

This also comes through in their choice of experts. Of about 5 scientists who appeared throughout the course of the programme, only 1 was supportive of Wi-Fi and several were political figures who were known for making cases against Wi-Fi. I'm not saying that these people shouldn't have been represented, I'm just suggesting that it would have been better if they'd consulted more scientists who take the same view as the World Health Organisation and say that it isn't a problem. It also didn't help their credibility that they went out of there way to find an expert that they could describe as eccentric and imply was merely an industry puppet.

Constant comparisons were drawn between Wi-Fi signals and mobile phone signals, though the show never really drew a line between emissions by phones themselves and the emissions of masts. Constant reference was made to "similar type[s] of radiation" and the "same sort of radiation" at "similar levels". They discovered 3 times the "level" of radiation about 1 metre away from a Wi-Fi enabled laptop than they did standing 100 metres away from a mobile phone mast. They attempt to justify this by saying that this is "at the point at which the beam was at greatest intensity where it hit the ground". I'm not sure exactly what they mean by that, but at neither attempt was their any repetition of the "experiment", nor was any accounting for background radiation and other factors taken into account.

Perhaps it was done off screen, though they have a deliberate shot of the presenter and the tester coming straight into a classroom and taking the reading immediately. While it doesn't necessarily prove their results wrong, this lack of basic experimental control (and I mean basic, my 11 (maybe 12, I can't remember) year old sister would know enough from her Science class to do a better experiment than that) and procedure, combined with their vague description of "levels" (no specific units were given and the only readout was a nondescript wave form on a surprisingly camera friendly hand-held screen) lends serious doubt to the credibility and reliability of their tests.

Let's not think scientifically here (not that they were anyway, but you get my point) and just apply a little common sense. A Wi-Fi router such as you might get in a school or home has a very small range, on in the tens of metres, and that's not accounting for walls and other obstructions. A mobile phone mast can send a signal over 50km or more, if on flat ground. Even in poor terrain it has a range hundreds, almost thousands, of times greater than a normal wireless network. And don't forget that a mobile phone has to transmit that distance back again.

Certainly, the transmitters in a citywide network will be more powerful than that, but each of them still only covers a few square kilometres, or else there would be no need for distributed nodes. So how can it be possible that Wi-Fi is 3 times more powerful than a mobile phone mast?

Later, they go to a town with a system of Wi-Fi nodes which provide free coverage to the city. The presenter walks around with a simple radiation monitor in his hand, with no shown calibration of any kind and and unknown scale, and notes that it goes "into the red there" while near a small market stall and, later, a node.

Once they're done making a mockery of the scientific process, they move on to a more specific case, one of a woman who believes she has a condition called "electrohypersensitivity". What this means is that when she's around strong "radiation" (presumably radio waves at the relatively narrow frequencies at which mobile phones and Wi-Fi devices operate) she gets headaches, miscellaneous pains and various other vague symptoms. What I find most interesting about this is not that Panorama simply accepts this woman's claims as fact, but that this woman, despite her presumably constant pain, chooses to live next to a mobile phone mast.

This would be somewhat like a man who breaks his leg and refuses to give up on training for the London Marathon. Bloody stupid.

Panorama "investigates" these claims in their own unique, balanced way by travelling to Sweden, the only country in the world that recognises EHS as a disability. In Sweden, we are introduced to a group of people who have taken advantage of grants from their government to have their homes coated in anti-radiation paint, and my own research shows that this can go far further, with the inclusion of shielded cabling and other special provisions, all at the expense of the Swedish taxpayer.

Panorama says that up to 3% of the Swedish population is believed to suffer from this condition and, applying that figure to the UK's population, concludes that there are 2 million EHF sufferers in the UK. 2 million, huh? That's an awful lot of people to be suffering from a condition which yields precisely 1110 results on Google, about half of which seem to be other explanations for the symptoms, ranging from fungi infections to simple psychosomatic causes. Or, to put it less tactfully, they're all imagining it.

The show then turns to one of their experts who has recently conducted a study on believed EHF sufferers. I'm not about to question their expert's credentials or the validity of his experiments, but the Panorama team interpret the limited data in a very interesting way. It's pointed out that the results of the study have not yet been released but that they've managed to get the results of their pet EHF "sufferer".

Apparently, she could tell whether a transmitter, outputting the type of radiation she believed herself to be sensitive to, was on or off two thirds of the time. It may just be the sceptic in me, but I am distrustful of two kinds of numbers reported in the media: simple fractions and anything exactly divisible by ten. I believe that, given their views as shown in the rest of the show, the journalists here would be far more inclined to round up rather than down.

But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that their EHFer got it right two thirds of the time, or 67% (being kind and rounding up). That sounds like a lot until you realise that, because the radiation could only be on or off, simple probability suggests that she could get it right 50% of the time just by guessing. From this single, inconclusive result, Panorama's crack team concludes that they had been right all along in their assertion that Wi-Fi was dangerous. It looks to me like a (carefully chosen?) statistical fluke, scientifically meaningless without further results and context.

Just a few further points before I conclude. You may well have noticed that most of the reports about Panorama's "study" describe the episode as an investigation into the effects of Wi-Fi networks in schools but, even from my brief summary above, you can see that the program spent an awful lot of time wandering around cities, travelling to Sweden and talking about mobile phones. Not to mention their quibbles over government guidelines which might just be based on incorrect data (and even if the guidelines were to be revised, there's no indication given that Wi-Fi and mobile phone technology would breach any new limits) and there constant reference to studies done on mobile phone technology (which one of their own experts admits have been largely inconclusive, when taken as a whole).

It strikes me that the whole "your children are in huge Godzilla-related danger" angle that was played up in the press was no more than a headline grabbing tagline to summarise this twisted little mess.

They also seem to have a rather poor grasp of the technology they are investigating, suggesting that Wi-Fi internet access makes no use of modems. While the user on a wireless network may not have to use a modem directly at their computer, any connection to the internet requires a modem somewhere along the line (see what I did there?).

Maybe that little error could be forgiven but one of their more political experts made a statement, supported by the show, that I could not believe. He said that Wi-Fi was different to mobile phones because you could choose to have a mobile phone but not whether you were in a hotspot or not. He reasoned that this is why something should be done about wireless networks without necessarily encroaching on people's beloved mobiles.

But, I thought even as he said it, surely you are far more likely to be in an area covered by a mobile phone mast that you are to be in a Wi-Fi hotspot? As evidenced by a recent call from the top of Mount Everest, you really can't escape that kind of "radiation".

I could go on and on about sensationalism, poor logic, terrible science, unbelievable bias, lack of detail, lack of common sense and a dozen other inconsistencies and errors in the show but I won't. It's just another example of the level to which television and the media have sunk in a world where success is dictated by ratings and statistics as questionable as those used in the show. Science is abused by scaremongers to get the facts and the reaction they want and results are twisted or falsified by those that do not understand them in order to further their own agenda.

The worst thing about all this is not that this kind of garbage gets on television. While we may not have the choice of avoiding the television signals flying around us, we can simply switch to another channel when garbage like this comes on.

No, the most tragic thing here is just how many people will believe this nonsense. Who won't question it. I have no qualifications or expertise in this field but with nothing other than my mind, my notepad and the odd Google search, I've found Panorama's argument to be so full of holes that it's practically a net. And yet, people see the show on TV, read about it in newspapers and on websites equally desperate for an attention grabbing headline (one I saw went so far as to say that there were fears over "computers" in classrooms with no mention of wireless networks until you clicked the link and read the article) and they believe what they are told.

Because of the falsehoods spread by this show and the scaremongers that make it and swarm to its "evidence", money will be wasted investigating spurious diseases, parents will panic and force schools to rob their pupils of easy access to the internet, costing more money and wasting time having wired networks fitted. Just 2 days after the program's airing and it's already begun. People will worry every time they see a marvel of technology and that's not just silly, it's sad.