Female Genital Mutilation

http://aplus.com/a/nigeria-bans-genital-mutilation?so=863e-aa69-101d2-d17b

Divorces Fell by 20% Since 2002

According to official statistics, the number of divorces in England & Wales fell from 147,735 in 2002 to 118,140 in 2012. That's a drop of 20% in ten years:

Source: ONS

In fact it's down from a high of 165,018 in the early 1990s.

Add to that the number of people who can now get married for the first tome thanks to same sex marriages and you could say that the institution of marriage is experiencing somewhat of a resurgence. There were 10,000 new civil civil partnerships in 2006 alone following it's introduction, for example.

Still Births Have Fallen Drastically Since 1927

The death of a baby is amongst the most tragic and heartbreaking thing for any individual to bear. The definition of a stillbirth is any baby born after 24 or more weeks completed gestation that did not, at any time, breathe or show signs of life.

Thankfully, such events are increasingly rare. According to official statistics the number of stillbirths in the late 1920s and early 1930s was as high as 42 per 1000 births. Nowadays, it's fewer than 6 per 1000 births:

Source: ONS

That amounted to a staggering 28,000 stillbirths per year compared to fewer than 4,000 today, even more amazing taking into account that the population of the UK was two thirds of what it was now.

Note the huge drop in stillbirths thanks to the introduction of the NHS in 1948. Those seeking to dismantle the NHS would do well to heed that as a warning of the effects of removing people's access to free healthcare.

Marked Improvement in Weather Reporting Accuracy Since 1980

The much maligned weather man gets a raw deal, it would seem. The accuracy of weather reports is improving steadily thanks to multi-million pound super computing installations that can more accurately model the weather patterns.

The following graph shows how, since 1980, the 3 day forecast has improved from around 85% to just under 100%. Likewise, the ten day forecast has improved from just 30% in 1995 to around 45%:

Source: BBC

As the BBC report puts it, overall, the accuracy of the forecast has improved hugely over the last four decades. Our current five-day forecast is as good as our three-day forecast was about 20 years ago. Our useful forecast window has increased by an extra day every 10 years.

Technology Keeps Getting Smaller, Faster, Better & Cheaper

Did you ever wonder how it is that today you can buy a handheld smartphone that's got way more computing capacity in it than all of NASA used to land man on the moon? More than IBM used to beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess? And all for £150 or so for a basic model?

The answer is that computing technology - processors, memory and storage - is getting exponentially smaller, faster, better and cheaper over time. It's so cheap that we can be frivolous with it today in fact. Flappy Birds, SnapChat, Tinder, kitten memes and terrabytes of selfies.

The only reason this is possible is that somewhere, in some research and development lab of a computer components manufacturer, boffins are slaving away to make the components of your phones and computers smaller, faster, better and cheaper.

Take processors, for example, the brains of your phone and computer. What makes them keep getting faster, smaller, and consuming less power than those of yesteryear is principally down to the fact that each generation is manufactured to be smaller than the last. This means that today's processors can either be smaller and use less energy, or cram more transistors in than the last generation of processors - or both.

Take this, somewhat elderly, graph showing how many transistors are crammed onto today's processors compared to those in 1971:

Source: go-rbcs.com

That's possible because the size of the transistors - the zero / one switches at the heart of any processor - can now be manufactured in mind blowingly small sizes. The sorts of sizes we're talking about here are tiny, measured in nanometers, which are equal to one billionth of a metre ( 0.000000001 m).

As recently as the year 2000, transistors were 130nm in size, which is still pretty small. But that's nothing, we'll soon be mass manufacturing transistors less than 10nm in size, whilst 7nm transistors have already been demonstrated in a lab. That's an incredible reduction in component size:

Source: qph.is.quoracdn.net

Those boffins keep on breaking down technical barriers preventing progress in building things at unfathomably small sizes, and processors keep getting smaller, faster, better and cheaper as a result.

That's why your next phone will be able to load Flappy Birds that bit quicker than your last phone.

Road Fatalities Halved Since Year 2000

According to official government statistics, overall road fatalities in the UK has halved since the year 2000.

The statistics refer to personal injury accidents on public roads (including footways) which become known to the police within 30 days. In particular, damage-only accidents, with no human casualties or accidents on private roads or car parks are not included.

As the following graph shows, overall fatalities halved from 3,409 in the year 2000 to 1,713 by the year 2013:

Source: UK.GOV statistics

The biggest drop in fatalities were for car occupants, due to increasingly safe car designs, and also pedestrians which have more than halved since 2000. The smallest drop was for cyclist fatalities, which still dropped 15%.

Recycling - We No Longer Just Landfill Our Rubbish

It's not so very long ago that once you'd finished using an item you'd bought, you chucked it in the bin (singular) and it got buried in a huge hole in the ground somewhere. Plastics, glass, batteries, food waste, oil cans, paper - the lot. A refined resource, used for the briefest of time, and then buried in landfill to decompose forever more.

Nowadays it seems unthinkable for most of us to not recycle our waste packaging. If you're stuck in a place without recycling bins with an empty can or bottle it feels uncomfortable to just bin it with everything else. If you have a type of plastic packaging which the local council won't accept in their collections it just feels weird not adding it to one of your recycling boxes. And all this is a surprisingly recent phenomenon in the UK.

As recently as the mid 1990s that most areas of the UK had no real recycling schemes in place. Only conscientious folks with enough time on their hands took their bottles and cans to bottle banks, there were no home collections. Even the traditional bottled milk collection and bottle return system was on the wane, and the pop bottle coin deposit schemes of the 50's and 60's had all but died out. Visitors from more enlightened European countries reported feeling the same un-comfortableness binning bottles and cans as we do today.

But all that began to change by the turn of the millennium, and now recycling rates in England have jumped from 11% to 42%:

Source: Insomnia.co.uk

Waste products like plastics and cans are both increasingly recycled where once they were just buried:

Source: Recoup.org

Source: Sustain-ed.org

But there's still a long way to go to eradicate the remaining landfill waste which cannot be recycled. One suggestion is that there should be more Energy From Waste (EFW) incineration plants in the UK like in many other countries, which would put much of the remaining 75% of un-recycled waste to good use, rather than being left to decompose into its constituent waste gasses in an ugly hole in the ground:

Source: Arc21.org.uk

That way the UK could incinerate about 50% of its waste to generate energy, recycle most of the rest and only landfill a tiny remainder, just like in countries like Denmark and Sweden.

The Internet - Knowledge is Power

The ability for the knowledge of mankind to progress and develop is dependent upon people observing a phenomenon, investigating its cause and publishing their findings for others to see. Historically, back when literacy was in the hands of the few, and the distance over which knowledge could be transmitted was very short, it was difficult for somebody to be able to document a piece of knowledge and have it read by enough people to ensure it was transmitted down the generations.

Consequently, whatever it was that caused the small population of Mesolithic people who built Stonehenge to do so is lost in the mists of time. Likewise, while ancient people could build complex machinery such as the Antikythera mechanism as early as 150 BC, perhaps inspired by the work of Archimedes, the secrets of its purpose, design and usage were not passed on to others, meaning it was centuries before such mechanisms were possible again. If knowledge isn't written down and passed on to others, it runs the risk of dying out within a generation and setting back progress hundreds of years before somebody else comes up with the same idea.

Since literacy was traditionally only available to the elite or the hierarchy of the church, the common man was barred from being able to read others work or write down their own observations. In pre-modern times it is unlikely that literacy was found in more than about 30-40% of the population, meaning that 60-70% of people were out of the equation of book learning altogether. This was true in England as late as the mid-Victorian era before compulsory education kicked in.

For centuries, the only way for a book to be duplicated was for it to be laboriously copied out by hand by scribes, which mean that books were outrageously expensive and limited in number. It is said that the 17th century poet John Milton, although blind towards the end of his life, was the last person to know everything because he had read virtually every book ever written at that time.

Given the small numbers of each book that existed, on numerous occasions library fires wiped out every last copy of a given work. Consequently, the list of lost literary works is long and harrowing, and who knows how much quicker knowledge would have advanced if those works had been duplicated and distributed before they were lost?

Then Gutenberg invented moveable type in 1439, and the cost of reproducing books came down drastically. The number of books published in Europe ballooned, directly enabling both the Renaissance and scientific revolution:

Source: Wikipedia

So the simple ability to publish works dragged humanity out of the dark ages. Even then, the ability for a person to record and distribute their ideas was limited by having the financial resources to allot the time to write a book and the backing of a publisher to print and distribute it. That limitation was only overcome with the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s.

Nowadays, it's possible for anyone with access to relatively cheap computer equipment, or even a tablet or smartphone, to publish their thoughts to the entire on-line world. Social media allows tweets and statuses to be broadcast instantly around the world, free blogs like this one allow publication of longer thoughts, ideas and concepts and cheaply hosted websites allow grander schemes to be demonstrated to the world. The number of 'authors' can therefore be said to have ballooned well beyond traditional book authoring since the arrival of the Internet:

Source: Seed Magazine - A Writing Revolution

Now, clearly there's a question over whether more quantity necessarily means more quality, and quite a bit of internet content is limited to kitten pictures and smut. However, the number of people that a given on-line publication can theoretically reach is now heading towards 3 billion:

Source: Internet Live Stats

The fastest Internet user growth rates can be found in third world countries where access to education has traditionally been limited, reaching up to 17% growth per year in many African countries:

Source: Internet Live Stats

Since the first website went on-line in 1991 there are now a staggering 980 million websites out there:

Source: Internet Live Stats

So, perhaps you might want to limit yourself to reading the five million articles in English on Wikipedia (launched 2001), or buying one of the 32.8 million books from Amazon (launched 1995), or watching some of the 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute (launched 2005), or maybe the collected thoughts of 1.5 billion Facebook users (launched 2004) and 300 million Twitter users (launched 2006). Or maybe one of the numerous free on-line book repositories with thousands of titles available for free.

Given that little lot, the chances of another John Milton reading everything that had ever been published are exactly zero. The democratisation of published knowledge has well and truly arrived.

All Hail the Smartphone

Given the ubiquity of smartphones, it's difficult to remember a time before they were here. Which is all the more amazing since the event that spurred them into popularity, the launch of the first iPhone, was in 2007 so we've had less than ten years of them in our lives, and already they are completely indispensable.

From that iPhone launch in 2007 there are now nearly 2 billion smartphones in the world as of 2015, which is predicted to rise to 2.56 billion by 2018.

Source: eMarketer

When the iPhone launched in 2007 it debuted at $499 or $599 depending on model, whereas now you can buy landfill Android handsets for as little as $30. So we're not talking elite purchases, we're talking about fully democratised pocket computing, which is why the next billion internet users are expected to be mobile-only. This is why Google's Android One programme is targeting low end phones at the Asian market for around the $100 mark.

The following Radio Shack catalogue advert from 1991 shows computers, phones, camcorders, cameras, dictaphones, music players etc., all of which are nowadays redundant items thanks to that phone in your pocket. Just to put this technological leap in perspective, in 1991 you would have paid $3.56 million to buy the equivalent gadgets individually and corresponding computing power that would duplicate the functionality of an iPhone today:

Radio Shack catalogue from 1991

In fact, you can easily run PlayStation 2 games on your phone nowadays, which back in the year 2000 took the best selling games console ever to run.

Today, your mobile phone has way more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. And NASA had multiple rooms full of IBM System/360 Model 75 mainframe computers, costing up to $3.5 million apiece plus the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft themselves.

Or to put it another way, when the most powerful supercomputer in the world, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, beat chess grand master Gary Kasparov in 1997 it did so with a then staggering 11.38 GFLOPS of processing power (where a gigaflop is a billion calculations a second). Today you can get a reasonably good phone like the Samsung Galaxy S5 which will do 142 GFLOPS in your pocket. Or indeed high-end phones using the same processor as the Google Nexus 9 that will do 364 GFLOPS.

How's that game of Flappy Birds coming on?

Gay Marriage Increasingly Legalised Across World

Now that the USA has formally legalised same sex marriage across all its states, the world has taken another step towards inclusiveness. It's part of an ongoing trend not to exclude consenting same-sex adult couples from designating their pledge to spend the rest of their lives together as marriage, just the same as we heterosexual married couples do.

Source: BBC News

For the past few hundred years of our 200,000 year history as a species, we in the West have had our definition of marriage constrained to a simple 'man + woman' pattern as defined by somebody as the 'biblical ideal' of marriage. Only now are those constraints being challenged, which is particularly timely because as of the 2011 census, 40% of Brits do not regard themselves as Christians and increasingly many do not really see why the church should be able to impose its narrow definition of marriage on them too.

Marriage has, of course, had a much older history than the comparatively recent Christian era. There was marriage in the pre-Christian ancient Greek and Roman worlds as indeed there was in the rest of pagan Europe, and those societies defined marriage according to their own definitions. Same sex marriages were going on during the Greek and Roman period as a fairly common practice. Same sex marriage even persisted in Europe as late as 1061. It seems that same-sex 'Boston Marriage' cohabitation between two women was tolerated in New England as late as the Victorian era.

Even more bizarrely, the Bible itself doesn't actually constrain its definition of marriage to the 'man + woman' template anyway, as this excellent infographic shows. If the Bible itself defines your spouse as loosely as potentially including your brother's widow, your concubines, your rape victim, your wife's slaves, your prisoner of war, your multiple polygamous wives and even your assigned slave partner, then what hope do we have of constraining marriage to a meaningful biblical definition?

Source: Upworthy.com

Increasingly, even the deeply religious country that is the USA now supports same sex marriage, which is reflected in their recent Congress vote, with similar results in Europe and Australia. Around 10% more of American people from all faiths and non-faiths are now receptive to gay marriage than they were in 2001. Figures range from 77% of non-affiliated people approving it, down to 23% of white evangelical protestants approving it, where a 10% increase is quite a shift in opinions in such a short space of time:

Source: Pewforum

The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriages in 2001. As of 26 June 2015, eighteen countries have legalised same sex marriage with the practice recognised in six more. Civil unions and registered partnerships are recognised in some or all of 22 further countries and unregistered cohabitation recognised in four more.

That's an amazing increase in just 14 years and it shows the progress being made in simply letting two people who love each other proclaim their intent to stay together in front of their nearest and dearest.

Pandemic Plagues a Thing of the Past

Since the dawn of time, humanity has been periodically overrun by terrible plagues and diseases. So it's hardly surprising we have an ingrained dread of epidemics still to this day.

Since its discovery in 1981, AIDS has caused an estimated 36 million deaths worldwide, which is a terrifying number for those in the regions most affected. The Ebola outbreak on West Africa was a terrible episode, which as of May 2015 had claimed 10,900 lives. Similarly, the SARS outbreak in South East Asia sent communities into a panic and has so far resulted in 775 deaths.

But, terrible though AIDS, Ebola and SARS are for those affected by its appalling symptoms, in terms of the percentage of the population of the day killed, they're often dwarfed by the plagues of yore. This demonstrates how far humanity has come in preventing and treating infectious diseases. This is not in any way to trivialise the plight of those living under the shadow of a modern day epidemic, but it is intended to provide some context to just how good humanity has become at shielding itself from the diseases of the natural world in modern times.

In classical times, when populations were tiny by comparison to today's urban based concentrations of millions of people, it was not uncommon to have plagues that would wipe out hundreds of thousands of people at a time and take out 30% - 40% of a given population.

Source: Listverse

By the mediaeval era there were great plagues like the Black Death in the 14th century, from which the total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at an appalling 75 million people, approximately 25–50 million of which occurred in Europe. That's a staggering 30% to 70% of population killed between 1346 and 1350 alone. The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 1700s. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.

Other smaller outbreaks of diseases include the 17th century outbreak of leptospirosis that killed 90% of the population of southern New England. or cholera pandemics that killed 100,000 people at a time in successive outbreaks in the 19th century, and a million people in Russia alone between 1852 and 1860. Likewise, Typhus outbreaks such as the one that killed 20,000 people in Canada in the mid nineteenth century.

Fortunately, nowadays the plague that caused the Black Death can be treated with insecticides, antibiotics and prevented by a vaccine. Likewise, Typhus can be treated with antibiotics and its insect-borne cause prevented via a vaccination. Cholera can be treated using simple oral hydration therapies with its cause through poor sanitation removed better isolation of sewerage from the drinking water supply.

Meanwhile, our treatment of modern day diseases is improving all the time too. HIV / AIDs can be slowed dramatically by the use of antiviral therapies and prevented by safe sex and prevention of blood contamination. The quest to develop a SARS vaccine is ongoing, as is the quest to develop an Ebola vaccine but containment for both is capable of halting the epidemic in its tracks.

Modern epidemiology and drug research will one day remove these diseases from circulation, just like it has done for the terrible plague, typhus and cholera diseases that once wiped out huge swathes of humanity.

Pope Re-States Catholic Church's Belief in Evolution and the Big Bang

That historic bastion of scientific suppression known as the papacy has come out publicly to reaffirm the Catholic church's belief in Evolution and the Big Bang.

Given that it is over 150 years since Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species you would have thought that the battle to convince the public that evolution could be explained by natural means would have been pretty much done and dusted a long time ago.

Yet, staggeringly, there remains a worrying large proportion of people in the UK and elsewhere that believe everything was created by a god as-is, or that their god has been manually tweaking things from the heavens throughout history.

In the UK around 80% of people believe in evolution, meaning that the number of people who do not believe in evolution has dropped to below 1 in 5, with a few not sure. That beats the USA where only 40% of people believe in evolution:

Source: Wikipedia

According to a poll run by Gallup, which asked the American public whether species were created, evolved with a god's help or evolved without a god, 42% of American people are straight-up creationists, who don't believe in evolution at all, be it god guided or otherwise! Thankfully, the percentage of US 'natural selection' evolutionists has risen from just 9% in 1982 to 19% today:

Source; GALLUP

If even the Pope can come to terms with the scientific facts, perhaps its time for the majority of the world's population to read up on Darwin's 150 year old book and follow suit?

Here's a BBC Bitesize GCSE revision guide to be getting on with: LINK and a Dummies Guide: LINK

Percentage of UK Children Living in Poverty Has Fallen Since Year 2000

The percentage of children living in poverty has fallen since the turn of the millennium, according to ONS figures quoted on the BBC News website.

Source: BBC News

The figures show a drop from over 25% of children living in poverty in 1999 / 2000 to just 17% by 2013 / 2014.

The BBC report notes that "A child is defined as being in poverty when living in a household with an income below 60% of the UK's average. Average household income in 2013-14 was £453 a week - making the poverty line £272 a week."

The BBC News article expresses concern that that fall has been partially reversed in this year's figures. However, the latest figures also showed that 9.6 million people were on relative low incomes in 2013 / 2014 which represents a fall of 100,000 on the previous year. This is down from 11.2 million in 1998 / 1999 when comparable records began.

Computer Games in a Different League

It's difficult to think of a field which is so demonstrates such incredible progress in a short space of time than computer games. Computer games didn't exist at all until some very basic things cobbled together on scientific oscilloscope screens in the 1950s. From that point until today's sprawling, high-definition 3D sandbox landscapes has been quite a journey.

It wasn't until 1972 that the first commercially successful game came about, which was Atari's Pong. Initially, it was only released as a cabinet based arcade game, but subsequently as home gaming systems began to take off in 1975 Atari released it as a dedicated console capable of playing just this one game.

To say Pong was basic would be an understatement. It was black and white, had basic bleep sounds and by virtue of the fact it was plugged into a home TV it was of course standard definition and narrow screen:

Fast forward 40 years to the current crop of games consoles. The recent E3 games expo in Los Angeles saw the announcement of the next crop of games for consoles like Sony's PS4. The PS4 has a CPU with eight 1.6 GHz cores on it and a dedicated graphics processor capable of delivering 1.84 TFLOPS, which basically means it's a bit tidy.

In the hands of today's games designers that means that a PS4 game today looks like this:

Skin textures look increasingly real, water flows realistically and reflects the light perfectly, foliage blows in the breeze and bends as the main character runs through it, the landscape consists of far-off horizons of towering mountains and idyllic towns and ruins.

But that's not all. The video games industry stands on a precipice at the moment, whereby the forthcoming releases of the long-promised technology of virtual reality headsets looks certain to herald a new era of super immersive gaming that will wipe the floor with what's gone before.

Take, for example, the Occulus Rift headset, now owned by web giant Facebook. It has developed to work with games consoles such that the wearer dons the headset and can see the landscape around him in 3D. This is still a pre-release technology at the moment, but it has blown the minds of those doing previews of the technology:

Expect Pong 1975 edition in 3D any time soon. Watch out for that square puck.

We're Taller Than Ever, Which Shows We're in Better Health

One nice and simple indicator of how much healthier we all are than we used to be is our height. Today we have a higher income, more sanitary living conditions and better education about health and nutrition than ever before. Add to that lower infant mortality and fewer mouths to feed due to smaller family sizes, and it means that the average person grew up with better nutrition than our ancestors, and it shows in our average height.

For example, by 1971 the average British 21 year old male was 10 cm taller than they were a century earlier in 1871:

Source: BBC News

And this trend is not just affecting UK males, it's repeated across the globe. The following graph shows upward trends in average height of around 10 cm per person between 1810 and 1980 in every region of the world:

Source: Our World Data

It seems that from skeletal remains found during archaeological digs that average height in Europe bumbled along at around 170 cm for the past two thousand years, before rocketing up to closer to 180 cm as a result of the industrial revolution.

Source: Our World Data

You can say what you like about modern lifestyles, but the stats show we are healthier than ever before.

Life Expectancy Nearly Doubled Since 1841

Life today for many of us is more sheltered, more surrounded by material goods and more connected to the outside world than ever before. It's also nearly twice as long as it was in Victorian times.

According to stats from the Office for National Statistics life expectancy in 1841 was around 40 years. By 2010 it had risen to around eighty:

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

And depending on how you measure how long we live, we might expect to live as long as 85 (males) or 89 (females) as a modal average, as the ONS report explains:

"In 2010 life expectancy for a newborn baby boy was 79 years and for a newborn baby girl 83 years. These are the average number of years a baby could expect to live if he or she experienced the mortality rates at each age in 2010 throughout his or her life. An alternative measure of average life span is the age at which half of all deaths occurred before and the other half after (median age at death); in 2010 this was 82 for a man and 85 for a woman, up to three extra years of life than given by life expectancy at birth. The third measure of average life span, the modal age at death, gives a further three or four years of life: 85 and 89 years for a man and woman." - ONS

The difference between the modal average and the other two measures is that the others are skewed by the incredibly high infant mortality rates in the Victorian era which reduce the statistical lifespan of the average UK citizen.

Back in the Victorian era the peak age at people died was around 60-70, whereas by 2010 it was around 85:

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010

So you've been given 15 - 25 years of extra lifespan just by virtue of the fact that you are living today. What will you do with it?

China is World's Biggest Investor in Renewable Energy

China is currently the world's biggest importer of oil, which combined with its infamous air-pollution problem, is driving the country to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. 

China's emissions (Source: BBC News)

According to Forbes magazine, the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century report put China once as leading rest of the world in renewable energy investment in 2013, spending a total of $56.3 billion on wind, solar and other renewable projects. 

By 2015, according to the Financial Times, China extended its lead over the US in investment in renewable energy, which rose 32 per cent to a record $89.5bn, with about three quarters of that going into wind and solar power.

As the BBC reports, this could mean that China's greenhouse gas emissions could start to decline within 10 years, according to a report from the London School of Economics. 

The LSE authors note that "China's pledge includes a commitment to use 'best efforts' to peak before 2030; we are beginning to see the fruits of China's best efforts. China's transformation has profound implications for the global economy, and greatly increases the prospects for keeping global greenhouse gas emissions within relatively safe limits."

Standard of Living

The standard of living in the UK is something that has risen almost imperceptibly over the decades. It takes somebody who has spent a great many years on the planet, with a good recall of the past, to illustrate how what we regard as every day essentials used to be regarded as impossibly luxuriant dream goods.

Historian and writer William Woodruff wrote of his upbringing in the Blackburn of 1916 in his book The Road to Nab End. In what sounds today like a Pythonesque parody of northern poverty, Woodruff relates about people being woken at 5am, to walk to the mill in their clogs six days a week. Home consisted of a two-up-two-down house with a slate floor dusted with sand downstairs, and a boarded floor upstairs you could see through the gaps of and hear a conversation downstairs as if you were in the room. Woodruff and his brother shared a bed with their parents, and his two sisters shared a bed in the other room. During the depression of the 1920s they went without coal over winter for weeks, and without even stale bread to eat for days at a time.

You tell that to kids nowadays and they don't believe you, etc. etc.....

If you think that's extreme or far fetched, here's some government statistics that back up that what we used to consider an every day necessity sounds today like something out of the ark. And likewise, what we consider necessity today seems like a ridiculously flimsy nice-to-have by comparison.

The government has been measuring inflation using something called the Retail Price Index (RPI) since the 1950s. To do this they defined a shopping basket of 700 common consumer items of the day that they could measure the cost of over time to see whether the cost of living was going up or down. Conveniently, this also shows how our attitudes to what is a 'common consumer item' change over time.

In the 1950s, we regarded a mangle, some candles and some frozen cod as standard consumer items. By the 1970s that basket included Smash mashed potato, cassette recorders and duvets. By the 2000s we regarded MP3 players, mobile phones and fruit smoothies as being equivalent consumer items!

Source: BBC News in 2009

By the RPI basket of 2015 we have added on-line games console subscriptions, e-cigarettes and a streaming music subscription to our basket of essential items.

You tell that to kids in Blackburn in 1916 and they don't believe you, etc. etc.....

Source: The ONS 2015

Health & Safety NOT Going Mad

Contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, health and safety is not going mad. It's one of the most ridiculous areas of self perpetuating mythology in the modern tabloid press, alongside its supposedly ever maddening little brother political correctness.

The mythology is so strong that the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) was motivated to keep a log of health and safety myths that had been reported as fact on numerous occasions by newspapers that really should know better if they weren't busy pedalling an agenda and unwilling to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

We've all heard the myths, everything from children being banned from playing conkers, office workers banned from putting up Christmas decorations, pin the tail on the donkey being banned, candy floss on a stick being outlawed, pantomime dames being banned from throwing sweets, pancake races being banned, adults being banned from putting plasters on kids etc. All of which totally untrue, but if the Daily Express and Daily Mail hadn't printed an of them they'd be reduced to a single sheet of A5 on most days.

Aberfan coal tip collapses onto a primary school in 1966 (Source: here)

Let's rewind a bit to understand why the concept of health and safety even came about. Following the industrial revolution, the rural poor got sucked into urban industrial jobs to escape the ever repeating cycle of famines and bad harvests for the promise of a captive source of income. The urban poor wasn't educated or particularly mobile, and so had to settle for whatever work was available to feed their families. At the time there was practically no legislation on workplace safety or public safety, meaning that unimaginably dangerous situations were allowed to exist at work and in public places causing deaths, often in hundreds at a time in a way that would be unthinkable today. In some cases, incredible lapses in basic safety were causing deaths in their hundreds well into recent years.

There were pit disasters with hundreds of deaths at a time, outbreaks of cholera due to appalling public sanitation, ships sinking without enough lifeboats for the number of people on board, gas explosions killing hundreds, mining waste piled high collapsing onto a school, there were fires in wooden stands and crushes in unsuitable stands at football matches, ferries that sank having set sail with their car doors open, tube station fires under rubbish filled escalators, fires in badly designed buildings made from flammable plastic, and so-on, all of which were preventable, and which caused from under a hundred to over a thousand deaths each.

Kids in mines with no safety gear (Source: socialstudieshelp.com)

Many famous buildings were built with an alarmingly high cost of human life to those workers building them. It is estimated that 30,000 people died building the Panama Canal and 500 died building Egypt's Aswan Dam, around a hundred workers died building the Hoover Dam and five workers died constructing the Empire State Building. Without some basic health and safety legislation in place, workers would still be dying in droves today, just like the estimated 900 construction deaths involved in building Quatar's World Cup venues. In the UK in 2013/2014 there were just two deaths per 100,000 workers, by contrast.

In many cases there was little or no legislation compelling companies to make sure their business wasn't profiting at the expense of hazard of death to the general public, The Health & Safety legislation that does now exist to deal with some of these glaring issues was brought in to deal with things like chemical hazards, the sale of dangerous goods, the use of things like lead and asbestos in construction, issuing of safety equipment to workers in dangerous conditions, and so on. You'll notice that there's precious little in there about conkers, Christmas decorations and pin the tail on the donkey.

The following HSE graph shows the decline in workplace deaths since 1974 from over 600 to fewer than 200 by 2014, as a direct result of better workplace safety. One can only imagine what the equivalent fatality figures were for Victorian times, where kids and adults alike worked dangerously long hours in dark, cramped conditions with heavy machinery and no safety gear:

Source: HSE stats on Workplace Deaths 1974 - 2014

If you want to point the finger at why some individual schools and business have chosen to put up a notice forbidding something relatively trivial on their premises, then look no further at the rise in litigious culture whereby parents will sue a business and seek compensation for an accident that befell their little Johnny. And that's the fault of societal greed and no-win-no-fee legal firms, not some left wing Health & Safety Gone Mad epidemic.

Improving Representativeness in Westminster - 2015 Election Update

Only a month ago, I covered the 'Improving Representativeness in Westminster'; a story of a continuing shift from a parliament once dominated exclusively by white, male, land-owning aristocracy to something which matches the demographics of the country a bit more closely. Since then, we've had a general election, and the situation has improved again.

For example, as the BBC reported, the number of female MPs has risen by a third, from 147 to 191 (out of a total 650 MPs). That's now at about 30% of MPs, as opposed to about 23% before the election. A handy graph shows how that number has increased slowly over time:

Source: BBC News

Similarly, The Guardian reported the rise of female MPs alongside the rising number of ethnic minority MPs. In the 2010 election there were 27 non-white MPs (4.2% of the total 650 MPs), rising to 42 in 2015 (6.6% of the total 650 MPs) where the current non-white demographic of the the UK is about 13%. Again, a handy graph shows how this trend is improving over time, now at over ten times the number of non-white MPs there were in 1987:

Source: The Guardian

Also, new Conservative MP Alan Mak, who is of Chinese-Malaysian background, is now the first MP of Chinese descent.

Also covered in the Guardian article, the number of privately educated MPs is dropping slowly too. In 2010 the percentage of privately educated Tory MPs was 54%, dropping to 40% in 2015. Likewise, in 2010 the percentage of privately educated Labour MPs was 14%, dropping to 11% in 2015.

The average age of MPs has hovered at around the 50 mark since 1979, but in this election the youngest MP since 1667 was elected in the shape of the SNP's 20-year-old Mhairi Black.

In terms of extremist parties getting seats, much was made of the fact that the predicted UKIP surge didn't materialise, where they actually lost one of the two seats they'd won in by-elections since 2010. But this doesn't mean that other right wing parties have prospered either, as the BNP won just 1,667 votes, which is 0.3% of the 563,743 votes they won in 2010. As the BBC points out, this election even the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party won 8,419 votes, while the Monster Raving Loony Party reached 3,898 votes!

In terms of general public voting, this election was the highest voter turnout this century. where 66.1% of eligible voters registered their vote (up from 65.1% in 2010, 61.4% in 2005 and 59.4% in 2001). Also, the number of 18-to-25-year-olds who voted was 58%, up from 52% in 2010 and 38% in 2005. In Scotland, the turnout was 71.1%, which is up from 63.8% in 2010.

Again, there's a lot of positive trends there, but true representativeness is by no means a done deal quite yet.

Discovery of Extra-Solar Planets Has Rocketed

Extra-solar plantes, or "exoplanets", are planets that orbit stars other than our own. Finding exoplanets is important if the human race is ever to succeed in finding life elsewhere in the universe, or indeed settle on another planet.

The discipline of exoplanatology is the attempt to observe such planets in their orbits around distant stars, which is no mean feat given that even the nearest star is 4.24 light years away!

Three Exoplanets imaged by the Hale telescope (Source: Wikipedia)

Whilst exoplanets have been rumoured to exist since the 16th century, it was not until 1988 that the first one was discovered. The problem being that at that distance planets are so tiny as to be invisible even to the Hubble Space telescope directly, and their existence has to be inferred by measuring things like the tiny gravitational wobble they impart on their star or a  minuscule dimming of their star as they pass in front of it.

Even then, scientists were cautious in concluding that a planet had been detected. It wasn't until 1992 that two more were observed orbiting a pulsar, and observed with such a degree of certainty that their discovery was regarded as definitive.

Since then a variety of techniques have been used, including direct imaging, radial velocity, transit and gravitational lensing. And the number of exoplanets spotted has rocketed, if you'll excuse the pun, and in 2014 there were 800 exoplanet discoveries:

Source: The Smithsonian

And this is a field that can only continue to grow, particularly since the James Webb Space Telescope, which is 100 times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, is due to be launched in 2018:

James Webb Space Telescope versus Hubble (Source: Wikipedia)

Real Things That Used To be Science Fiction

Futurology, the study of predicting future technological advancements, is littered with failed predictions of how we'd all be living in cloud cities and eating meals in pill form by now. But just recently there has been a rash of genuine inventions right out of Sci Fi, and these were published respectable journals on days other than April 1st.

For example, CNET are reporting a paper published in Nature from researchers from Griffith University and Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have successfully created a high-definition 3D holographic display with a wide viewing angle of up to 52 degrees, based on a digital holographic screen composed of small pixels that bend the light. While there is still work to be done, that's something straight out of Star Wars from 1976 that exists in the real world now.

Also, as Forbes reported, a flying car straight out of The Jetsons, being designed by AeroMobil, could go on sale as soon as 2017. Last year, the Slovakian company unveiled its latest prototype of an elongated, road-ready vehicle with stowable wings that can navigate both city traffic and the airspace in between landings and take-offs from the world’s airports.

Flying Car from AeroMobil

Another staple of classic sci fi like 2001 A Space Odyssey or Red Dwarf is a computer that you can talk to. These days, we're so used to Google Now, SIRI and Cortana on our phones that this technology has become mainstream. However. IBM is taking it very seriously and recently reorganised itself such that the Watson super computer that became champion of champions on the American game show  Jeopardy! has become one of Big Blue's main go-to-market business units. That means that they're setting its problem solving abilities off on complex healthcare and 'smarter cities' challenges that could really affect the way we live our lives in future.

IBM's Watson computer wins Jeopardy!

We've had about 20 years of science fiction works involving quantum computers. In 2011, Canadian company D-Wave  announced the D-Wave One quantum computer, sporting a 128 qubit processor. By 2012 they had announced the D-Wave Two, the world's first commercially available quantum computer. In 2013 NASA, Google and the USRA launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab using a 512-qubit D-Wave Two that would be used for research into machine learning. So, that's a pretty strong endorsement that it's a technology that has well and truly stepped out of the page and into the real world.

D-Wave 2 Commercial Quantum Computer

All very interesting, but where's my self driving car like the Johnny Cab in Total Recall? Well, here it is, thanks to Google, and it's not science fiction but it's science fact. It has been driving trials round San Francisco for a while now and, pending legislation, it will be coming to a road near you some time soon.

A Google Self Driving Car

But what about robots that clean your house? Already done, and on the market with self-guiding vacuum cleaners like the Roomba.

Roomba vacuum cleaner robot.

If you add in a couple of recent 'stretch target' developments, things start to get very interesting. For example, IFLScience are reporting that NASA may have stumbled upon how to achieve Warp Drive, that staple technology of 1960s Star Trek episodes that drove the Starship Enterprise faster than the speed of light through the final frontier using an EMDrive electromagnetic thruster. Now NASA seems to have taken down the tentative announcement that IFL Science is referring to, but there's plenty of speculation on the matter elsewhere.

An EMDrive thruster prototype

Likewise, the space elevator, first proposed in science fiction by Arthur C Clarke as a cheap way of getting satellites and space craft into orbit, may be just over the horizon. Scientists at Penn State university have created strands of diamond nanotubes, which may be the strongest man made material yet created, which cold act as a lift cable for hoisting things into orbit, slung round a geostationary satellite (another Arthur C Clarke proposal that became reality).

Space Elevator (Source: Wikipedia)

At this rate there won't be much left in science to write fiction about.