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Link Of The Day: This Post Brought To You By Opiates

IT is not magic pixie dust, Meta, UK elections
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UPDATE Sunday noon

This morning’s X- ray shows it’s pleurisy, probably fungal and migrated from the yeast infection in my kidney. That’s the trouble with being immunosuppressed, any stray infective organism sees me and goes “come on guys -FREE FOOD!

Damn it, I haven’t been through all this just to fall to a fungus at the last hurdle. And I suppose better a pleural infection than a heart infection. I do try to be resilient, but still, the bright side is a little hard to find sometimes.

UPDATE Sunday a.m: Just call me Job. The shoulder pain got much worse during the night – it seems I may well have dry pleurisy and/or pericarditis.

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

But never mind, there’s always an upside to everything, and if I hadn’t had to look up pericarditis I’d’ve never come across the amusingly named coxsackie virus..
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Light posting from me today: the reason is that, when I was intensive care post kidney transplant, the medics tried numerous times to put in an arterial line (Considering the damage, they must’ve used a hammer and chisel.)

Doing this caused several massive haematomae – and subsequently scar tissue – to form up my right arm and damaged both my radial and median nerves. The damage appears to be permanent. (More than you ever wanted to know about needles and nerve damage here)

The practical upshot is that my right hand and arm are numb yet paradoxically incredibly painful at the same time and my shoulder hurts like a very, very hurty thing, and as I have a high tolerance for painkillers, it takes morphine to shut it up.

Yes, I know I should be grateful to still be here and I know too that yet again, they were trying to stop me from dying, but bloody hell, don’t they know I have blogposts to write?

Not that anyone reads them, but I have rage to offload. Especially about the election.

Anyhow, if you don’t read anything else today, read Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science piece, “The real political nerds”, on just how crappy the data management of election information by UK gov has been and how intelligent bystanders have taken up the slack. It’s packed with interesting links if you, like me, are a political nerd too.

“Want to look back at how people voted in your local council elections over the past 10 years?” asks Chris: “Tough. Want to compare turnout between different areas, and different periods? No can do. Want an easy way to see how close the election was last time, and how much your vote might make a difference? Forget it.”

Like so many data problems, all that’s needed is a tiny tweak: all this information is known to someone, somewhere, and it’s all been typed in, several times over, in several places, local websites, newspapers, and so on.

So what the hell have we been paying for all this time?

Oh yeah.

Losing Nanotubes On The Tube

IT is not magic pixie dust
Published on

Everlasting data storage is the holy grail of government and the police, so I expect Lawrence Livermore will shortly be receiving an advance order from authoritarian in chief Jack Straw. From Computerworld via Digg:

Researchers have demonstrated a form of archive memory using carbon nanotubes that can theoretically store a trillion bits of data per square inch for a billion years.

The technology could easily be incorporated into today’s silicon processing systems and it could be available in the next two years, a lead researcher said.

The scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California said the new technology can potentially pack thousands of times more data into one square inch of space than today’s chips

That’s pretty damned clever, but think of just one of the many implications: not least, what do you actually do with that unlimited stored data? We know what public employees are like with discs and memory sticks and the like and any nanotube storage device would likely be portable – and ideal for a civil servant to drop on a train or lose in the post or even accidentally flush down the loo, perhaps:

The government today offered a £20,000 reward for the safe return of two missing CDs containing personal details of half the British population.

The Metropolitan police, which has been heading the search for the data, has asked thousands of government workers to check their desks and homes “in case the package or discs have turned up”.

Last month, the government admitted that details of all child benefit claimants, including dates of birth and home addresses, had been lost in the post when sent from a HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) office in the north-east to the National Audit Office. The information on the discs was not encrypted.

In a statement, the Met said its primary search had been concluded without recovering the discs, which hold the details of more than 25 million people..

Perfect for the DNA Database, then.