They haven’t gone away, you know…

Posted on by
Reply

I see that the party that came up with the policy of moving government departments and offices to their ministers’ constituencies – at the cost of efficiency, corporate memory, careers, effective public service and €238,000 per job – still think it’s a good idea.

Facepalm. And obligatory Einstein quote.

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Einstein

Except that’s not quite apt. It’s more accurate to say that a Fianna Fáil politician will do or say absolutely anything to get elected or re-elected, and hang the consequences for the country in the medium to long term.  Which is, of course, just like any other party.

Between this, and the utter stroke politics being attempted by Enda Kenny in the past week, I’ve come up with new guidelines for Irish elections:

1. Don’t vote for any candidate from a party with an Irish-language name.

2. See who is left.

3. Sigh. Select the least worst.

Qualified?

Posted on by
Reply

The woman in the video has the opposite “problem” to me.  Applying for a System Administrator’s job, she states “As my resumé indicates, I have a Masters degree and a lot of education in non-technical topics.”

The satirical video is, ironically, exactly what much of the Irish public service is doing when it recruits.  If you don’t have a degree, you don’t get in the door for an interview.  It doesn’t matter what the degree is actually in – you just need to have gone to college for three or four years and passed an exam.  It doesn’t matter that you’re already doing exactly what the job requires.  That you have been for years.  That you do it consistently well.

No “qualification”, no interview.  A degree in Agricultural Science, or French Literature, or – as one’s qualification doesn’t have to be Irish – a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) Degree in Comic Art – gets you in the door of, for example, the Office of Government Procurement, who were recently recruiting specialist ICT buyers.

If you’ve actually been working in the ICT sphere, administering hardware, software, systems and policies, for over a decade – and been buying the stuff you use, too, for all of that time! – but have no degree?  Nah, not interested, no interview.  Grr.

#kenringwatch results for June, July and August!

Posted on by
2

#kenringwatch is like waiting on a bus – nothing for ages, then three come along at once. Results for June, July and August are finally here – apologies for the delay.

In related news, Jamie points out in the comments on the May results post that Ken Ring is actually less accurate than a coin toss.  His work is available on the Silly Beliefs website – where an article on Ring’s pseudoscience has resulted in over 550 comments being posted!

Those comments are an interesting read… disappearing posts after the fact, other major misses, and failures to predict major events.  But then that’s only to be expected.

Ring has also popped up again recently in the comments to my original 2014 #kenringwatch post, where he says:

“I have also had a fair degree of success for this year with my Ireland almanac. I said no records would be broken this year and no extreme events would be likely.”

 

He forgot Christine and her sisters… the most severe storms to hit Ireland in years. Or that his accuracy for 2014’s Irish weather predictions is currently languishing at 20%.

Anyway – June, July, August. The predictions were:

Jun
19. Last week of June the hottest.

Jul
20. Last week of July the hottest.

Aug
22. Lot of wet days interspersed with dry days.

So, two easily testable predictions, and one completely vague one.

June: “The majority of highest maxima were recorded between the 16th and 18th during the mid-month period of high pressure, with the highest maximum of 27.1°C recorded at Newport, Co. Mayo on the 17th.” Zero marks.

July: “Nearly all highest maxima were recorded between the 23rd and 25th, with the month’s highest temperature recorded at Carlow (Oak Park) on the 25th with 27.6°C.” Ooh, close – the 25th is seven days from the end of the month, so one of the hottest days was technically within the last week. Let’s be generous and give half a mark.

August: How do you interpret “Lots of wet days interspersed with dry days”? The Met Éireann monthly report has a one-line summary: “Dry in parts but extremely wet in the East; cool everywhere ”  Other stations in the Dublin area and at Mullingar reported their wettest August days in 28 to 64 years, with rainfall analysis of their 24-hour totals reporting the events to have rainfall return periods of between five and 20 years. Dublin Airport, in the east had 20 rain days, 11 with no rain. Claremorris, in the west, had 26 rain days, only 5 with no rain.  So, certainly, “lots of wet days” is correct. I think Ken gets this one.  But it would have been nice if he’d said “Wettest August in years!”

June, July, August: One and a half for three.

Total: Four and a half out of eighteen.

We’re up to 25% accuracy!

Sigh…

Posted on by
Reply

I know, I know, I haven’t posted in ages. Sorry. Life has been busy, and then there were holidays, and then there were distractions…

This weekend, I’ll be updating with not one, not two, but <em>three</em> months’ worth of #kenringwatch!

Speaking of dodgy pseudoscience, Dublin City Council had at least one (if not two) motions calling for the banning of water fluoridation, on the agenda of tonight’s Council meeting. Thankfully the motions weren’t reached, so they’re kicked to touch for another future meeting.

Jen ‘Buffy’ Keane explains much better than I can why the anti-fluoridation campaign (led by angel healers and homeopaths!) is bunkum. Please get in touch with your councillors before the next meeting, and ask them to vote to retain what the World Health Organisation describe as one of the ten best public health initiatives of the 20th century.

#kenringwatch results for May

Posted on by
8

I should have written about the local and European elections. I should have written about the Tuam babies outrage – and the lack of coverage in the traditional media about the issue.  I should have written about a lot of things – but I’ve been busy, and lazy, and busy again. Apologies.  Must try harder.

And instead I find myself writing about Ken Ring again. We last heard from Ken when I posted the April results, where he accused me of lying. He’s not been back yet to retract, or apologise.  Oh well. I didn’t lose any sleep over it.

He’s back in the news again. Denis O’Brien’s newspaper published an unchallenged puff piece on Tuesday.  The predictions listed largely agree with what he’s published or said elsewhere.  And apparently Ken “collects regular data from several weather monitoring stations which he has positioned around Ireland.”  Selling the old almanacs must be lucrative, so – I just have to rely on the daily data collections published on Met Éireann.

The Irish Times followed that up with a piece on Thursday – though as that article talks about a seemingly upcoming appearance on The Saturday Night Show (the season is long over) and Evelyn Cusack’s attack on long range weather prediction quacks, from December, it’s possible the “paper of record” was too busy not writing about the Tuam Babies to come up with a new piece, and just regurgitated something.

So Ken – who predicts that 80% of earthquakes take place in 80% of the month – how did we do in May?

May
16. Lots of sun, 14th to 20th/21st (1)
17. Snow 30th May (1)
18. 3rd week of may, very cold (subzero?) temperatures (1)

Using my er, Met Éireann’s nationwide network of weather stations, handily compiled into a report, we find:

“Sunshine totals were all below average with percentage of LTA values and total sunshine hours ranging from 56% and
98.7 hours at Knock Airport, its dullest on record since the station opened in 1996 to 91% and 173.0 hours at Belmullet.
Casement Aerodrome reported 61% of its LTA with 112.7 hours and its dullest May on record since the station opened
in 1964 (50 years). The month’s sunniest day was recorded at Belmullet on the 28th with 15.5 hours, equalling its
sunniest May day on record since 1957 (57 years). The number of dull days (less than 0.5 hours of sun.”

The 14th to 21st was average for the month (i.e., dull) – the last week was the sunniest.

Snow on the 30th? Just lol.

3rd week of May the coldest? The chart for max temperatures shows us that the highest temperature in the month occurred in the third week. The first, second, and fourth weeks seem coldest, according to the chart, with the third week being the second-warmest.

So, not a good month for Ken.

May: Zero for three.

Total: Three out of fifteen.

That’s down to 20% accuracy.

 

The true story of a little girl who ran away in 1960’s Ireland

Posted on by
Reply

irishmansdiary:

“People were kind then too, you know”

It’s important to remember this.

In a week where the general public find out about 800 dead children interred in a septic tank, having died in the care of the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam, County Galway – and in a week where none of the mainstream “respectable” media will touch the story with a bargepole – it’s important to be reminded of this. Some people care.

Originally posted on 140 characters is usually enough:

“You’re a Guard there? Oh, I know that town well. My mother’s buried in a pauper’s grave there.”

My friend was in Clare, around the turn of the millennium, to bury his brother. The woman, in her fifties, told him her story at the graveside.

On a grey day in the late 1950s, a young woman crossing the bridge in a Cork town, as the phrase went, dropped dead, leaving behind a husband and four small children in dire poverty in a neighbouring village. The family was broken up and the children were taken into “care”, scattered to different institutional “homes”.

Not yet ten, one of the daughters was sent to the nuns in Limerick. From there she was farmed out as a cleaner, washing floors and laundry for priests. Eventually she was sent to work along the Shannon estuary, cleaning the chalets once used by pilots of the flying boats; chalets the nuns had taken over. Years of mistreatment took their toll and one day, at the age of thirteen, something inside her…

View original 565 more words

#kenringwatch results for April

Posted on by
3

Your friendly local #kenringwatch correspondent has finally cracked it.  Ken Ring? He’s Ned bloody Stark!  It’s the only logical explanation.

Ken Ring is coming!

“February? Snowy! March: snow! April? It’ll snow. May’s gonna have snow!”

Ken, like Ned Stark, is all about the “Winter is coming!” this year, and has predicted snow for the first five months of the year. Like the doubting Southerners of Westeros, I’ve gone “Pshaw!” and mostly been right.  Maybe Ken will be proven right next month.  Because unfortunately he didn’t manage it this month, either.

Our predictions for April were:

Apr
14. Subzero(!) temperatures finish around April 19th
15. Snow 22nd April

On April 19th, we got invaded by Wildlings from north of the wall!  Well, north of the Bull Wall.  And they weren’t Wildlings, they were Vikings!  The 1000th anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf was on Wednesday 23rd, and there was a re-enactment of the battle in St. Anne’s Park in Raheny on April 19th (subzero temperatures).

There are some rather awesome photos of the event here and here and especially here!

As you can tell from those photos – there was no snow.

I got sunburnt.

April 22nd?  The week as a whole, including yesterday was sunny, mild, with the odd shower. Or extremely wet and windy, if you were in Cork yesterday.  But no snow. Winter is still coming.

April: Zero for two.
Total:Three out of twelve.