Islingword Street

MR(U)SA

Interesting report in the NY Times shows that it's not just the NHS that's having trouble with cleanliness. MRSA killed almost 18,650 patients in the US during 2005 - a rate of about 1 per 16,000 people. In England and Wales in the same year there were 1,629 deaths related to MRSA, about 1 per 32,000 people so half the overall rate in the US (though that's just on a bare population figure, rather than per hospital episode or anything fancy).

Gore blimey

Congratulations to Al Gore (and the IPCC) for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I see that the BBC 'most recommended comments' page on the topic is, as always, full of right wing nuts.

I wonder whether the right-wing noise machine that is the BBC Have Your Say feature is a bad sign for (a) the BBC's ability to get user interaction right, (b) the future of politics or (c) the future of the human race. Or (d) all of the above, I suppose.

So proud to be British

How could I not be when we have such a wonderful upstanding press? Take the Daily Mail, which forever defends this island against politicians of a socialist bent, immigrants and those cunning, waxed-moustachioed Europeans. This fine example of all that is best about British honesty and fair play has, the Economist reveals:

[paid a Pole] to drive a Polish-registered car to Britain and spend a few days breaking parking laws and speed limits with a photographer in tow, to demonstrate that Poles and other eastern European immigrants flout British rules with impunity.

When challenged as to the accuracy of this allegation, the Mail reporter claimed it was OK because they only committed civil offences, not criminal ones.

So, in summary, deliberately procuring people to break the law is fine upstanding British values, slandering immigrants and deceiving your readers is an essential part of our proud island's history, but exercising your right of free movement within the EU is an abomination that must be stamped out immediately. See also under "Human Rights"

The best the Obs can get

Today's Observer has and interesting piece on shaving, with the writer being given a tour of Gillette's research facility in Reading (complete with MIT-style "eureka stations" where people can drink coffee and have ideas).

Free Parking

There's an article in Salon today (sub or click through advert, sorry) that really surprised me. I'd always assumed that American car parks were so big because Americans drove everywhere. It turns out that the causation may in part be the other way round: lots of planning regulations require developers to provide large numbers of on-site parking spaces - up to twice as many as would be required on a normal day. Thus, an academic study of Tippecanoe Co., Indiana, revealed that the county (pop. 155,000) has more than a quarter of million excess parking spaces: in other words if every car registered in the county was parked in a car park rather than at home, there would still be parking spaces for 250,000 other cars.

This is so far from the British approach (which is getting tighter and tighter on car parking provision in new developments) it makes my head spin.