grumpyf1

Put down your Shakespeare omnibus and peer over the top of your glasses - According to a new “Geek Index”, older fathers are likely to have geekier sons. Presumably, this means that the chaps at King’s College London who carried out this research generally have dated daddies themselves. The same won’t apply to any of the lasses involved though, as daughters are seemingly unaffected. The age of yer Ma seems to be irrelevant too. Whilst delaying having kids increases the risk of genetic errors, sons of fathers with more mileage on the clock are statistically likely to have a high ‘geek score’. The mini-nerds do better at school, and outstrip their peers in just the subjects you would expect, such as maths and science. There are some interesting theories as to why boys wearing bow ties are designing super-computers using spaghetti, or building Large Hadron Colliders with Lego round the back of the bike sheds. Geek dads might take longer to start a family (perhaps failing to spot...

If you were riled by the Right, laughed at the Left or found the political middle ground too vanilla at the recent General Election (the first one, in case there’s been another one since I wrote this on Wednesday), there were some exciting independent candidates. First up, in the local Westmorland and Lonsdale constituency, the (then) Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron was up against Mr Fish Finger, a man who changed his name by deed poll, and dressed as the orange easy-tea favourite. His fishy-pun-filled “Manifishto” included promises of more fish fingers on hospital menus, no tax on chip shops, and an immigration policy guaranteeing “open waters for fish of any race, creed, colour or gender”. That probably didn’t go down well with UChip. With Farron taking the win by just 777 votes following a recount, Mr Fish Finger’s impressive 309 would have been firmly in the spotlight had the numbers bream slightly different. Image if Tim had lost by a few hundred votes. That would ha...

With so many big stories dominating the news recently, it was easy to miss the sad passing of two significant people who helped to make being a kid, and an adult, joyful. With increasingly bitter political campaigning and the horror of terrorist attacks filling our TV screens, websites, social media and newspapers, the recent deaths of John Noakes and Peter Sallis received limited coverage. Both deserved much more. Noakes brought his give-it-a-go bravery and sense of humour to children’s TV show Blue Peter at the end of 1965 and packed a mind-boggling array of adventures, stunts and things made out of coat hangers into his 12 year tenure on the show. No-one presented the programme for longer than the Yorkshire lad, and his arrival heralded a move away from the refined tones and comfy middle class style of Valerie Singleton and Christopher Trace. By the time I was old enough to be making the show an essential part of my week, Lesley Judd and Peter Purves were partnering the ev...

Right now, working in IT probably feels like a poor career choice, what with stranded flights, frozen systems, angry Android users and off-message display boards. IT sounds like a lucrative and dependable way to make a living. We all need the wonderful world of the web, and, like it or not, even your chips only make it to your plate (or newspaper of choice) thanks to their computer-residing namesakes. The ploughing of the field, planting, fertilisation, pest-control, reaping, transporting, bagging, selling, distribution – even the cooking – all are likely to have involved some form of processor. We need the IT experts. We rely on them, in fact. We’ve become so dependent on them being on top of their game that we’d be fighting each other to death in the street for a Curly Wurly in a matter of days if the world’s computing power went offline. Presuming we could find the street without our phone telling us which direction it is. The WannaCry ransomware that took out the NHS’s s...