Showing posts with label happy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happy. Show all posts

Friday 2 December 2011

Shed stress: Feckless parents: Higgs boson-nearly: Audible burp: Big bug: and are you H.A.P.P.Y?


Definite lack of vertical distance in the liquid metal heat gauge at the Castle this morn, the study is still awaiting delivery of any type of non working what knots, his Maj has decided to stay in the warm today and I spent an hour replacing the ballcock yestermorn.


Sheds “could help men live longer.” The “newspaper” adds that the “therapeutic effects of pottering around relieves stress, which lowers blood pressure and even boosts self-esteem”.


Yeah right, hands up all those “potterers” who can’t even get into their haven because of all the crap stored there.....



Think that giving more money to poor families will not help the issue of child poverty because feckless parents will spend it on themselves, Iain Duncan Smith warned on Thursday night.
He warned that extra money provided to dysfunctional families may simply be spent on drugs or gambling, rather than on helping children.



Sigh... 


Earlier this month, physicists announced results of a combined search for the Higgs by the Atlas and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Their analysis, presented at a meeting in Paris, shows that physicists have now covered a large chunk of the search area in detail, ruling out a broad part of the mass range where the boson could be lurking.
An even more important milestone in the Higgs hunt beckons in December.
Researchers have now excluded the possibility that the Higgs (in its conventional form) will be found between the masses of 141 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and 476 GeV.
Finding the Higgs boson at a mass of 476 GeV or more is considered highly unlikely.
This means that physicists are now focussing their hunt on the remaining "low mass" range - a small window between 114 GeV and 141 GeV.
Within that window, there is an intriguing "excess" in observations - a Higgs hint, perhaps - that stands out at 120 GeV.
But as fluctuations go, this one is relatively weak - at around the two-sigma level of certainty.


Get it, got it- good...
 


A 13-year-old was handcuffed and hauled off to a juvenile detention for burping in class, according to a lawsuit filed against an Albuquerque school principal, a teacher and city police officer.
The boy was transported without his parents being notified in May after he "burped audibly" in PE class and his teacher called a school resource officer to complain he was disrupting her class.


Good job he didn’t fart......



Discovered up a tree, this giant Weta has been declared the largest ever found – weighing the equivalent of three mice.
The insect, with a 7in wing span, was found by American bug lover Mark Moffett, 53, on Little Barrier Island, in New Zealand.
The nocturnal creature, known as Wetapunga or "god of ugly things", is the largest sub-species of the giant Weta, weighing the same as a small bird.
The Wetapunga can grow up to 10 centimetres long and its leg span can reach 20 centimetres.


Need a roll of wallpaper to sort that out....
 

And finally:



A study of well-being has shown 76 per cent of people rated themselves as seven out of 10 or more when asked to gauge how satisfied they were with life.
A further 73 per cent rated themselves as seven or more out of 10 when asked how happy they felt yesterday.
But more than one in four, or 27 per cent, rated themselves above five out of 10 in a scale where zero rated as ''not all anxious'' and 10 rated as ''completely anxious'' when answering the question ''how anxious did you feel yesterday?'' compared to more than half, or 57 per cent, with ratings of less than four out of 10.
The poll of 4,200 adults carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the figure rose to 78 per cent when people were asked to rate the extent to which they feel the things they do in life are worthwhile.


When “they” have asked the other 63 million odd and come up with a proper answer I might take some notice.


 

And today’s thought:



Angus

Monday 9 November 2009

Hot Hamsters; lachanophobia, Too posh to play; No hope=happy; and wind up your workers

Really late today, BF 250 last night, hardly slept at all, drove through the pea-souper to the smash and grab, staggered round and out of thirty checkouts there wasn’t one open, plenty of gormless looking morons standing next to the checkouts but not one in use.

So I had to take my trolley to the ‘self serve’ thingy and spent ten minutes listening to the female equivalent of Stephen Hawkins telling me that there are unexpected items on the whatnot and don’t forget to swipe my clubcard interspersed with the comments from six other self serve thingys telling the other poor sods the same thing.

And to top it all DD over at Noclue has panicked me into buying a ginormous bar of chocolate, just in case.


Don’t you just love shopping?








After what seems like two hundred years of Labour rule they have finally decided that we need more nuclear power stations and in order to hide their dithering and ineptness they are going to “fast-track” planning permission for the said glow in the dark voltage producers.

And;





A bit of good news; Ratty is doing well in the wild, a survey of the UK's waterways called 2009 a "bumper year" for water voles, which had been considered to be one of the nation's fastest declining mammals.

The study, organised by British Waterways, recorded 89 sightings of the rare rodent - twice as many as in 2008.

Ok so 89 isn’t a lot, but maybe Badger, Mole and Toad are looking after them.


First up:
The latest thing for Crimbo this year is apparently battery powered Hamsters, I kid you not;

Parents have been snapping up the Go Go Pets, known as Zhu Zhu pets outside the UK, as soon as they hit the shelves.

Jerry Storch, chief executive of Toys R Us, says they are a phenomenon on a par with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the smash hit of Christmas 1987.

There are five of the interactive pet hamsters, Mr Squiggles, Patches, Chunk, Pipsqueak and Num Nums.

Each responds to touch with squeaks and noise and can run about when set to "explore mode" or "choo and chirp" calmly when held.

They also react to accessories sold especially for them, including a toy house, bed and car.

Mr Storch said initial demand for the toys was so strong that Toys R Us did not list them in its Christmas toy catalogue to avoid disappointing customers.

“Word of mouth alone stimulated demand to the point that if we advertised it would only be bad for business,” he told the Financial Times.

The range was launched in the summer by Cepia, a small company based in St Louis, Missouri, in the US that was founded in 2004 by Russell Hornsby.

And Mr Hornsby intends to capitalise on the success of his toys, with plans to bring out a range of other animals.

“It’s not just hamsters,” Mr Hornsby said. “We are bringing out the clans: chipmunks, squirrels, hedgehogs, rabbits. We have all sorts of cute things coming.”

Wonderful, that really is something to look forward to, and a bit of advice for the kiddlies;

If your useless parents can’t get you a Num num don’t shove a rechargeable AAA battery up the arse of your real Hamster in the hope of turning it into a Go-go.
Vicki Larrieux, a 22-year-old student from Portsmouth, claims she is unable to keep to a healthy diet because she is frightened of vegetables.

She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea.

Miss Larrieux survives on a diet of meat, potatoes, cereals and an occasional apple but refuses even a single slice of carrot on her dinner plate.

"I have always had an irrational fear of vegetables even as a child I used to properly freak out if some carrots or a few peas were on my plate," she said.

"But as it continued into adult life I started to think it might not just be a dislike for vegetables but an actual phobia.

"Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.

Great excuse, anyway aren’t potatoes veggies?

Parents who dress their children in designer clothes are hampering their development because it stops them playing properly, claim researchers.

A study has shown that the wearing of inappropriate outfits is a serious problem for playgroups because the wrong dress can seriously disrupt a whole class.

Offending dress included lack of warm clothes such as coats and gloves, inappropriate footwear like flips flops and expensive outfits that were "not to be ruined", the researchers found. These meant children were reluctant to go outside to play and nursery workers were unwilling to send them out.

Daily physical activity offers numerous health benefits, and time outdoors has been found to be associated with children's overall activity levels, the researchers said.

It is also good building up co-ordination and social skills.

But Dr Kristen Copeland, a child health researcher at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, found that inappropriate dress was a "barrier" to that development especially at playgroups and nurseries.

The study, reported in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, suggests that inadequate or inappropriate clothing could restrict children's outdoor play.

The study found that a few children dressed improperly could prevent the entire class from going outside, thus restricting physical activity.

It also emerged that clothing choices were a significant source of conflict between parents and child-care providers.

Carers suggested several reasons why parents may dress their child inappropriately, including forgetfulness, a rushed morning routine, limited income to buy clothes, a child's preference for a favorite item, and parents not understanding the importance of outdoor play.

Dr Copeland said stricter guidelines were needed "so that children's active play opportunities aren't curtailed".

Gobsmacked!!!!
Giving up hope can make those living with a serious illness happier, according to psychologists.

Researchers found that patients who continually hoped for a cure for their condition were likely to be more miserable than those who accepted their illness and tried to get on with life.

Peter Ubel, director of the University of Michigan Centre for Behavioural and Decision Sciences in Medicine, spoke about "the dark side of hope".

"Sometimes, if hope makes people put off getting on with their life, it can get in the way of happiness," he explained.

"We think they were happier because they got on with their lives. They realised the cards they were dealt and recognised that they had no choice but to play with those cards."

Yet another article from the University of the bleeding obvious.



And finally:
Miserable people make better judgements than their cheerful counterparts and may also be better at remembering things, a study indicates.

People in a bad mood are more critical, and pay more attention to their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they were told, according to the research.

"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world," psychology professor Joseph Forgas, of the University of New South Wales, said.

"Our research suggests that sadness ... promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."

People in a bad mood were also less likely to make snap decisions based on racial or religious prejudices, and they were less likely to make mistakes when asked to recall an event that they witnessed.

The study also found that unhappy people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Prof Forgas said showed that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style."

"Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages," Prof Forgas wrote.

Which means that I must be the best blogger in the world?


Angus

AnglishLit

Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE

Angus Dei politico







Saturday 24 January 2009

WE ARE H…A…P… P…Y BUT BORED

We are more bored, more tired and less likely to know our neighbours, so sayeth the New Economics Foundation (NeF) BBC NEWS

We Brits came in sixth place on the happy scale, and thirteenth on the wellbeing scale.

The Danish topped the ratings overall, and the French were two places below us in wellbeing.

According to the Nef, the UK was among the bottom four of the 22 nations on the basis of feelings of trust and belonging, including how close they were to their neighbours.

Nic Marks, founder the Centre for Well-being at Nef, said: "Governments have lost sight of fact that their fundamental purpose is to improve the lives of their citizens...
"The UK's long hours culture and record levels of personal debt, have squeezed out opportunities for individuals, families and communities to make choices and pursue activities that would best promote personal and social well-being."

I’m with you there Nic.

This will be the last Angus blog for a while; I am taking some time off to attend to real life issues, but check back now and again, you never know!

"Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms." Kahlil Gibran-“The Philosophy of Logic”



Angus

Monday 22 December 2008

CHRISTMAS




This is the fourth Crimbo I will spend on my own; I’m not looking for sympathy, or invites.
“We” really used to enjoy the festive season, no thought of the homeless or the poor, or the old, or the lonely.
Since “Mrs Angus” passed, my outlook has changed, I look on Christmas as something to get past, and over with, but I do think about the above more. Christmas to me now is a time of reflection and pondering, a time to look at the past year and add the good and the bad bits to either side of the “scales of life”.
The past three have come down heavily on” the Bad side, this year I think they may well be balanced, I have discovered the joy of Blogging, made quite a few “online” friends, and learned a lot.
I have tried to change a bit, to be less “abrasive” and more considerate in my writing, some of you may have noticed.
But deep down the “old” Angus is the one which will win, I don’t “think” too much when I write (and it shows), I call it my auto-pilot, and when I do think I get bogged down for words and unsure of the direction to take in my mindless wanderings.
I don’t tend to go into too much detail, because I find it boring to read pages and pages of stats, or quotes, and I like to think that others do as well.
So I like to “Tease” readers with a small amount of facts and then supply a link, so that they can find out for themselves what the hell I am rambling on about, because you learn much more from finding out for yourself.
I enjoy making comments on articles, and try to make people smile because then they will remember me and revisit the blog (shameless self-advertising), but that is what I do.
I love writing for NHS Exposed, the “team” are great and really supportive, and I enjoy letting loose the “Dogs of War” on the Powers That Be.
I will spend this year at home in my dark, cold garret, and will have Crimbo dinner with my Neighbours, who are the best you could have. After dinner I will stretch out on the couch and watch the TV, with my cat on my lap (there's nothing nicer than stroking a pussy in your lap), and probably fall asleep, not much different to anyone else really.
Next year I will carry on, I will continue to write and comment on things that I feel need to be brought to the attention, of others. And I think that the abrasive, gobby, patronising arrogant “Angus” will re-emerge, I hope so because I really like him.



I haven't quite got ot the point where I enjoy Christmas again yet, but you never know.

As to Crimbo-I hope you have a wonderful time, over eat, don't drink too much, and enjoy, because life can be far too short, and you don’t get a second chance.

This is my last post for a few days but,I shall be back on the 27th.

Thank you for reading the blog, and putting up with my ramblings. And I also hope that next year will be peaceful, prosperous and kind to you.
Angus

Saturday 8 November 2008

Spare wheel. What spare wheel?



It’s Saturday, and once again I have the hump.

Went out to the car this morning at about 6am and there it was- a flat tyre. It was pissing with rain, but if I wanted to get my nicotine fix, and go to the 24hr supermarket, I would have to change the wheel.

I opened the boot, lifted the spare wheel cover and there it was. One of those firkin “Skinny Safety Wheels”, I didn’t know about it because you don’t bother to look. Do you?

And it would mean moving all the crap that was in the boot as well.

Who the hell thought that up? Which “Einstein” thought it would be better to provide a spare wheel that you can only use up to a certain speed and for a certain distance? Rather than one you could use properly and don’t look like a Pratt when you are driving. With people sniggering and pointing at your “pride and joy”

So, in the pissing rain at 6am on a Saturday morning I changed the wheel. The car now looks as if it has had a stroke, three nice shiny “proper” wheels and one thin bright yellow one.

It is also covered with stickers, such as “80kph only” which is what in English?

And “do not travel more than 30 miles” I am even more confused now because they are mixing the “numbers” and what happens if you get a puncture 31 miles from home? Does the damn thing self-destruct because you have exceeded the allowed distance?

Now I will have the pleasure of trying to get the flat tyre fixed, which is not easy because when you go to one of those tyre places you get the sharp intake of breath and “sorry you are going to have to buy a new tyre.”

Why?

I checked the “flat” and there was nothing in the tread, the only other thing it could be is the valve. I didn’t run it when it was flat so that hasn’t damaged it.

But no, it will have to be a new tyre, plus valve, plus balance, plus disposal of the old tyre.

I am not a happy bunny, so if you live near me and have a Honda, don’t be surprised if you come out tomorrow and some bastard has swapped one of your wheels for an ugly thin yellow thing. It will be me.


Angus