I am reminded of an episode of Fawlty Towers where two people are each Doctor Somename and are in fact two doctors who are married to each other and Basil Fawlty gets into a muddle about it.

I suppose that the scriptwriters could have got more from that as one could have been a medical doctor and the other, say, a linguist.

Basil could have then asked one of them to look at his foot and be advised to speak to the other one and Basil get indignant about whether it was a demarcation issue and would it be the first doctor if he had asked about his head.

William

I got a publicity email from Tesco today with a list of offers including 25% off with ClubCard.

So I had a look and one of them was the following.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/p … /296508569

I am wondering what it is about and how it works.

I wondered at first if it was like those 1950s "magic" painting books where one painted with water and various areas came up in various colours.

But there appear to be five pens or markers.

William

Not the same thing, but I saw this and thought it more appropriate to add it here rather than start a new thread.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment … r-AA14gr62

Compare and contrast with quantum entanglement. Maybe a silly suggestion to do such a compare and contrast, but is there any similarity at all?

Such possibility is why I always include my middle initials on formal output. So three initials and surname. Alas, so many people try to edit my name by missing out the third initial, even if replying to a letter from me or a form that I have filled in correctly.

There was a public review about formatting names.

https://www.unicode.org/review/pri434/

I replied.

https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/CLDR-15263

I later sent some other notes on the topic. I have seen them listed on a previous occasion.

William

Thank you for posting the video.

It is a pity that such discussions use the example of cruelty to a sentient creature.

They could quite easily use a glass vase instead. The glass vase remaining whole or becoming shattered.

William

A 'new to you' car can be essential if one lives in a rural area and has a job that is other than very local or reachable and returnable from by public transport.

For me, retired, no longer driving, a computer is essential. I need it in order to arrange grocery deliveries from Tesco. The ability to then be able to do things like access this website, watch YouTube videos and use Duolingo.com to learn Welsh and to improve my knowledge of Esperanto and try a bit of Dutch and a few others, are basically then "free except for the cost of the electricity" bonuses.

If someone has a child or children, then it is reaonable for every effort to be made to give them the experience and memories of a happy Christmas.

Balance that though with that recently one newspaper had a feature of how a woman had managed to save £900 a year. Ooh, big story. Actually, she had cancelled subscriptions to various movie streaming services and so on, things that many of us had not spent money on in the first place.

I notice that Joe's list does not include anything about alcohol, tobacco or expensive types of food.

Are any of those needed?

I get adverts about how bottles of wine are ONLY (my emphasis) some amount of money.

I wonder if the various campaigns that happen in January, namely giving up alcohol, giving up smoking, go vegan, will have more people joining in when money is tighter.

William

I don't know very much at all about quantum physics, just a bit from over fifty years ago.

But, well, all the stuff about items purportedly communicating across the universe with each other at faster than the speed of light, seems to not take into account the fact that they were once both together and may both have some shared memory gained together.

So say the man with half of the sixpence is at Land's End and he tells another man that the woman who has the other half of the sixpence is at John O'Groats and that she has blue eyes.

So the second man promptly travels by the fastest means available to John O'Groats and immediately upon arrival finds the woman and notes that she has blue eyes.

So, the solution is that at one time the man and the woman were together and he observed the colour of her eyes and has remembered that information, not that he was able from Land's End to determine the colour of the woman's eyes by some fantastic instant observation over that great distance away from her when he was talking to the second man.

William

I saw something about entanglement and one article, just a general thing, seemed to me to have a bit of an Emperor's New Clothes thing about it. Believe or at least go along with, stupidity or be regarded as stupid oneself.

But some time later I saw another article and it seemed ssensible in that the two things, to be or seem to be entangled had at some previous time needed to to be together.

So I remembered four things from ordinary life that seemed the same.

The half-a-sixpence thing, where a man who has to go, perhaps to war, or whatever, cuts a coin in half and keeps one half and gives the other half to his girlfriend.

Someone who had a degree from Cambridge told me that his certificate was ripped across the lower edge and he speculated that somewhere in the university was a book with the lower ends of degree certificates in it with the names of the people to whom the degree had been awarded, so that the authenticity or otherwise of a purported certificate could be determined by attemping matching the torn edge of the purported certificate with the retained lower part.

Apparently in olden times in Italy if a woman gave her baby to an orphanage because she was unable to look after the child properly, she could tear a piece of cloth in two and put one half with the child and keep the pther half. Thus the mother could reclaim the child at a later date if her circumstances improved.

I read somewhere that in olden times, possibly in England, but I am not sure, the terms of a loan or perhaps a mortgage were recorded on a plank of wood by means of holes and marks and then the plank was cut down the middle and each of the two people retained one half, thereby a protection as to what had been agreed.

So is quantum entaglement something like that, information retained in two pieces that were once together?

Placebo is interesting. I read somewhere of a trial where people were given placebos and some got better.

Apparently, placebos have in some cases been known to work even when the patient knows that the tablet has no medicine in it.

That sounds peculiar, but I am wondering if the routine of having something to do, like take one at 10 am and take one at 6 pm, helps give a structure to the patient's day so that the patient is not just at home alone all day, but has tablets to take, so maybe makes a meal to have with it, rather that letting his or her regular eating pattern drift.

I remember reading of a mental hospital where they gave patients electrical shock treatment and patients got better. One day a new docor, who had previously worked elsewhere using the same treatment, and pointed out that the equipment was broken and not in fact giving any electrical shock at all. So the question arose as to why the patients had been getting better. It was concluded that instead of normally feeling isolated and lonely, in the time before, at, and after the procedure, the patient was the centre of attention from the doctors and nurses and that had a positive effect on the patient.

Astrology is interesting as some parts of it may be encoding observed knowledge. For example, one's star sign. Well, that is indicative of which nine months one was in gestation, and a country far from the equator has ambient temperatures and light intensity that vary greatly during those months, and chemical reactions often depend upon temperature. So does which nine months gestation takes place affect the brain?

I read once of a French study where they used a French book of a similar nature to Who's Who, and compared day and month of birth of people at the top of whatever they did, like musician, artist, soldier, whatever, using a null hypothesis that birth date should not be significant as to profession. But apparently the null hypothesis was disproved.

However, the result could be skewed by the cohorting of children into school years.

For example, as children playing football in a year-group, boys born in September may be 10% or more, more developed than boys born in August as they are almost a year older.

I might have read somewhere that there is a tendency for professional footballers to have been born sometime within September to December.

Another thing about Astrology. If one looks at the sky and sees a star, that means that the light from that star is causing a sensation in one's brain. Do we know that as well as what we call vision that it is not causing other effects as well?

William

To me, Eco-warriors block gives the impression of a number of people all positioning themselves around the tree to prevent forestry workers cutting it down.

If I have understood it correctly this appears to be the staff of the forest in a dispute with town councillors and then, in the style of an Ealing Comedy, all is resolved when a third party points out that the town council has no jurisdiction over the piece of land where the tree is planted.

It does seem unnecessary to kill any beautiful living tree so as to display its dead body somewhere for a few weeks rather than let it live and thrive.

I wonder what is the carbon cost of cutting it down in that the dead tree is no longer absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

I know that the one from Norway in Trafalgar square in London was always burned afterwards in case it had some tree disease or some such story.

Perhaps the solution would be to plant one and have it there permanently.

Norway Spruce looks good in spring when fresh green shoots appear and there is a two-tone green display.

On an issue that might be related, in Evesham they used to have, and maybe still do, a Tree of Light each year as Christmas approahes.

And they used to kill a tree and display its body and people could pay (I think it went to charity) to have the name of a deceased loved one listed in a roll of honour that was published and also conserved.

For whatever reason, the Tree of Light changed from killing a tree and decorating it with lights to decorating a large tree growing in the town, it is either a sequoiadendron or a sequoia, with lights, the same tree every year.

William