You make a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis and that hypothesis lives and dies by its proof.

And that’s pretty much how I judge the entire world.

And thus I blog about things that don’t pass the test.

It’s not a nice niche but it’s something. I couldn’t contain myself to just blog about economics or chemistry, or teen-angst or religion. I set this blog up to vent about the vacuous stupidity of those who claim faith but then I found that there was equal invalidity in politics or science or whatever. I cannot resist!

If there’s one thing this blog is about it’s stupidity…. but please remember it’s subjective. My posts about quantum mechanics are purely from a layman’s perspective (allbeit one with a Physics degree). If it doesn’t make sense, if it isn’t intuitive, if it is plain STUPID I will blog about it, given enough time.

So how long will it take me to find something stupid today? Counting now… even with my limited bandwidth where I currently am…

Aha… found my first stupidity in 15 seconds, but I can’t blog it as it would prejudice my divorce trial.

I can’t find, right now (can’t be loading Al Jezeera from here or I’ll go mad) a decent story, but let us be content to know that across the world the middle east unrest is being reported from every conceivable angle. There is only one correct angle. Which is it? I’d love to know.

Just a few posts ago I was a single guy with nothing to bother him. Then I got married. Then I had a son! Amazing stuff!

Unfortunately my marriage took a turn for the worse and I’m going through a divorce now. I cannot comment on it still but one day I am sure I will have plenty to say about born again christians, the child support agency, the courts and much nore.

For now though let me leave you with the greatest, the bestist, the only… MOnty Python:

May I present Axis of Awesome:

This is a bit more on theme for the blog though…What would Jesus Do?

My favourite lyric “He’s a Zombie Wizard…”.

The new theme might take a bit of tweaking but I think this is a bit easier to read and less gloomy than the old one.

Anyway, let the posts recommence!

I financed a car recently and since I’m a sucker for a bit of maths I decided to work out how much I felt my repayment would be. I found a large difference between the amount I calculated and the amount the company wanted me to pay. I figured that the company would levy some penalties against me for early settlement of my arrangement but I wasn’t expecting such a large amount.

As I investigated this with the company I discovered that my calculations were actually wrong. Not that I did my math improperly but that the way the loan was constructed and the way the contract was carefully written meant I had failed to include a couple of figures in my sums.

First off I had not been aware that two fees in my arrangement were not included in the top level figure, ‘Total Amount for Credit’. Well go figure! The ‘Total Amount for Credit’ was in fact NOT the ‘Total Amount for Credit’. There was an additional fee added to this number (bad finance company!!) and there was another fee due at the end of the loan which wasn’t financed (understandable but not at all clear).

Once all this was worked out there was still a difference between my calculation and their calculation and although it was now much smaller it was still over one hundred and fifty pounds. So I decided to dig deeper and this is where the useful advice comes…

Credit contracts in the UK are governed by the Consumer Credit Regulations. Repaying these contracts before their term is covered by the Consumer Credit (Early Settlement) Regulations 2004. If you want to go read it please just ignore the equations on calculating repayments – they’re actually just a way of stating something much easier and obvious to calculate on a spreadsheet.

Here’s the important thing. When you tell your lender that you want to settle early they must send you a letter that tells you how much you must repay and when. The ‘when’ is crucial. It is a legal entity referred to as the ‘Settlement Date’ in the Regulations. Once the company states the date it is set in stone.

Now your lender will set a Settlement Date of 28 days after you ask for an early settlement. This is to allow them to claim 28 days more interest from you which is fine. However they may at their discretion delay the settlement by another 30 days, allowing them to net 58 days more interest in total. Again this seems perfectly reasonable. There has to be some give and take when you want to get out of a contract.

The important thing is that they can’t just tell you to pay them the relevant amount at any arbitrary time. If they only defer by 28 days then the payment is due in 28 days. If they defer by 58 days then the payment is due in 58 days.

My lender made this crucial mistake. They charged me 58 days interest but stated the Settlement Date as only 28 days after my request. I bitched about this to them repeatedly and told them if they continued to demand the money I would take them to the ombudsman. I quoted repeatedly from the Regulations and lo and behold they told me to keep the extra 30 days interest. However, of course, they accept no liability and insist that their contracts and arrangements are perfectly inline with the law. Their withdrawal of the demand was simply ‘in the interests of continuing customer satisfaction’.

BULLSHIT!

Anyway I won and the important thing is always to check that you are not being charged this extra 30 days interest and being asked for it before it is due.

Also you should know that under the regulations they are not permitted to otherwise charge you ANY other penalties or fees for early settlement. If you have been charged any such fee on a finance deal, pick up the phone and get complaining!

Oh and here’s another little trick they try and pull. They try to get you to overpay the loan and then return you the difference. This arises because you are required to continue paying your normal payments up until the settlement date. But in their letter to you they will typically tell you the amount in total that you need to pay between now and the settlement date, including what your regular payments will be. Imagine you were paying $100 per month on this example loan and you’ve been told you owe $1000 in 58 days. You are going to make two payments in that 58 day period then blindly send them $1000 and find that in a month or so you get $200 back.

The regulations state that the settlement amount should be only what you need to pay on that date to finish up. I refused to pay my lender the extra money, pointing out that they had absolutely no right to demand it and that they were once again breaking the regulations by suggesting in their wording that I was required to overpay. Again they backed down.

Bullet point summary incoming!

• Don’t let them charge you 58 days interest over 28 days.
• Don’t let them make you overpay.
• Don’t let them charge you ANY other penalties for settling early
• I’m not a lawyer but I won on all counts against a very large finance house.



]]> http://blog.using.me.uk/2010/04/complaining-again/feed/ 0 http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/10/busy-busy-and-lazy-but-i-did-make-it-to-tam-london/ http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/10/busy-busy-and-lazy-but-i-did-make-it-to-tam-london/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:25:21 +0000 PadainFain http://blog.using.me.uk/?p=136 Yeah I really have been busy lately. I’ve been on holiday to the Lake District which was fantastic. I’ve been to TAM London which was awesome. I must blog about that … now!

TAM was an affirming experience. It was incredible to be around so many people who share the same view of the world as I do. It was also an absolute pleasure to listen to what the speakers had to say.

Funny story in a kind of had-to-be-there way. I was sharing a room in the city with Jumile and on arrival on Friday night we both refused a wake-up call confident in the knowledge that our iPhone’s had alarms on them. Well I turned mine off knowing that Jumile’s was set. However thanks to his inability to drive an iPhone and the fact that there was no natural light in our room we overslept. That is to say he overslept and I overslept, we did not oversleep ‘together’.

So we missed Brian Cox’s talk first thing on Saturday. I’m really annoyed because I think he’s a great bloke and everyone said how much they enjoyed it. But on the face of it, given that I have a Physics degree it’s probably the talk I could most ‘afford’ to miss. Lesson learned though – don’t rely on one iPhone or one driver.

So we arrived just as Jon Ronson came on to talk. He was… FUNNY! He regaled us with tales of his research into his latest book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which will shortly be in our cinemas, having been adapted as a screenplay and starring George Clooney!

I won’t bore you with the content of the entire weekend but let me tell you that it was a fantastic weekend. Every speaker was brilliant and was well received by the attendees. Two ‘acts’ were given standing ovations to my memory – Simon Singh and Tim Minchin. Simon received this accolade before he even took to the stage as those of us present back his bid to defeat the BCA’s Libel suit with every fibre of our brains. Simon also received the JREF Humanist of the Year award or some similarly titled accolade – sorry I can’t find the proper name/link right now! Of course James Randi himself received a similar ovation but he was unfortunately only able to be with us by Video link as he is recovering from Chemotherapy for his cancer.

For legalese updates on Simon’s battle with the BCA please see JackofKent’s blog. It’s had some interesting turns lately, not least the appeal court’s decision that he has the right to appeal the original ruling on ‘meaning’. JackofKent is a lawyer and he explains all of this very carefully.

Richard Wiseman was the compere/MC for the weekend and while it was a shame that he didn’t give a talk he was very amusing. The chicken towel trick was brilliant, but I did work out the number square long before the applause had died down – now you know Richard… towels>Maths. For anyone who didn’t work it out yet… take four numbers that add to your chosen number ‘A’. Now add X to one, subtract X from another, add Y to a third and subtract Y from the last… place them in another quadrant. Now repeat with new X and Y for the other two quadrants. I’ll leave it to you to work out how you place them correctly to form the precise magic square. I may have oversimplified just a fraction to keep the mystique.

My favourite two speakers of the weekend were Phil Plait and Ben Goldacre.

To take the latter first, I have been working my way through Bad Science since I got back from France this week and although I thought I understood controlled trials and placebo effects already he has enlightened me immensely. But what made his talk so good was the humour and attitude he presented. I’m absolutely sure that if Mr. Wiseman hadn’t interrupted he would have been happy to talk for the rest of the day and the enthralled audience would have sat and listened way past closing time at the local pub. I cannot recommend his book highly enough and for those of you who are less skeptical than I am, I can assure you that this is not a book about lack of faith. It is entirely about being rigorous in one’s research and proclamations. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as they say, but even ordinary claims require more than just an anecdote. I’ll just point out that his book has been out for quite some time and TAM is weeks past now and the book is still number 29 on the Amazon bestseller lists as I type this. If you’ve heard that something is good for you or bad for you or that an injection causes AIDS or a lipbalm causes Herpes this is your one stop shop for how to determine what medical advice is bogus.

A mention must go here to the Cochrane Collaboration. I think this is what Ben would want. The Cochrane Collaboration perform Systemic Analysis on medical research to make individual studies into larger studies which reveals more reliable results. By weighting results based on the properness of the studies and combining studies together to form larger data sets for better accuracy this group is the ultimate resource for the concerned patient worried about any medical procedure.

While we are here I’ll just mention how astonished I am by the ways in which a study can be skewed and the ways in which the placebo effect works. It bears writing an entire article or book, or encyclopaedia. But read ‘Bad Science’ and you’ll know everything I do.

And as for Phill Plait? Well he introduced me to the fact that in 2029 an asteroid will pass incredibly close to the earth. In fact it will be so close that it will pass between us and the Moon’s orbit. Consider how vast space is… that is REALLY close. However it will miss. We know this. Everyone has done the numbers. It will miss.

Ok… so not such an interesting talk after all… NO! The problem is that when this asteroid passes us it will, of course, be perturbed from its orbit by our gravitational field. Because we can only determine its path with a certain degree of accuracy though we don’t know exactly where it will go next. On one side of its potential path it will be catapulted into the sun, never to be seen again. On the other side it will be catapulted out of the solar system, never to be seen again. In a very small area somewhere inbetween though it will be shifted into an orbit that means in 2079 it will come back and collide with us.

This is not a small object. It won’t cause a nice light show and burn up in the atmosphere. It won’t cause a tunguska like incident. It will however cause an explosion equivalent to around 1 BILLION tonnes of TNT. This is somewhere in the order of the same asteroid that current theory believes caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. This would be an event from which you can’t hide. Probably humanity would survive but most of us would die. You’ve seen all the apocalypse films… it would really be not such fiction. Dark skies for years? No Crops? Most of the world’s population dead? Doesn’t sound like a place you want to be.

So what are the chances of that? According to the best mathematical calculations it’s 1:14,500. That seems pretty unlikely right? Well do you play the lottery? It’s 1000 times more likely than you winning the lottery in any week. It’s about the same as you winning the lottery in the next 20 years. This one will get you… it’s more than 1000 times more likely than you dying WHILE watching one episode of the lottery.

So can we do anything about it? Yes we can. All we have to do is send up a spaceship to sit alongside the asteroid for a few years. The relatively tiny mass of the spaceship will, over those years, shift the asteroid just enough to mean that there is NO chance that it will be deflected into an orbit that could be dangerous to us. We are technically able to make a ship to do this now. However NASA and the ESA are not prepared to spend funds to do it. They have limited funds naturally and everything they do is no doubt important to scientific progress but would you not think that this is the most important thing they should do? I beg you to petition your MP/Senator/other-political-representative to get on to this NOW!

At this point you might think well let’s wait and see. When we know whether it’s in that particular path that will cause us a problem we’ll do something about it right? WRONG! By the time it’s possible to determine whether it’s going to deflect in just that certain way, it’ll be too late. It will take years to build the spaceship we need for this job and it will take years for its effect on the asteroid to be large enough to save us. By the time we know whether we need this doing or not there will not be enough time to do the job.

Hopefully this has persuaded you that this needs to be done. But perhaps a few of you still aren’t convinced. Perhaps the cost/benefit analysis in your mind makes it a waste of money? So I’ll end this with one last fact. The ship we could build to perform this job would not be used up in the work it would do. It would be perfectly functional and ready for the next threat. And believe it… sooner or later a direct strike by an extinction-event sized asteroid will happen. On the law of averages we are WAY overdue for one.

On Saturday evening we were entertained by Robin Ince and friends. It was a lot of fun but I won’t pretend that there weren’t a lot of scars caused by the rapid assembly of the entertainment. My favourite act, ignoring the brilliant Chris Cox, was the guitarist and singer who’s name I have totally lost. I hope he will forgive me as describing him as the ‘middle aged chap’… can someone help me out here and supply a name?

A memory that won’t leave me very quickly was from Sunday evening. At the Black Friar pub just around the corner from the event I could look around me and there were Richard Wiseman, George Hrab, Brian Cox, Phil Plait, Chris Cox, Simon Singh and others who had educated and entertained us all weekend.

I’m very grateful to all of them for giving of their time and effort to help the rest of us skeptics get our heads in gear.

I’ve quit smoking – clean for 8 weeks now!

I’m off to see Tim Minchin at the Hammersmith Apollo tomorrow night!



]]> http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/10/busy-busy-and-lazy-but-i-did-make-it-to-tam-london/feed/ 0 http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/07/afk/ http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/07/afk/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:24:00 +0000 PadainFain http://blog.using.me.uk/?p=106 I’m moving house this weekend so I’m unlikely to put in appearance to post or moderate until Monday.



]]> http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/07/afk/feed/ 0 http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/06/working-on-it/ http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/06/working-on-it/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:29:15 +0000 PadainFain http://blog.using.me.uk/?p=42 Damned Spymaster has overwhelmed my Twitter Feed. Hopefully I’ve tuned it down properly now. The damn application offers you rewards for Tweeting about tiny events in the game but they’re just too silly to go on with.

Anyway I’m working on a massive article on the nature of the universe, self, consciousness, the state of particle physics and much more besides. Right now the draft is in ten parts so look out for a flurry of posting very soon.



]]> http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/06/working-on-it/feed/ 0 http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/05/welcome/ http://blog.using.me.uk/2009/05/welcome/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 10:28:04 +0000 PadainFain http://blog.using.me.uk/?p=3 Hi and welcome to my new blog. I have run out of patience with my Drupal installations and decided to start over. In the coming weeks I’ll transfer all the articles from my old sites to this one.

Here I will post everything that was previously split over two blogs. Both my generic personal stuff and my Critical Thinking.



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