Sock Monster

Arggggg! Some how a sock monster must have got into the van we used to move my stuff to the new house. I am sure that when I went to America I had over 2 weeks worth of socks but now I only seem to have 9 pairs and 2 of those are crappy! One day I really am going to carry out my threat and throw them all out and then go into Marks and Sparks and buy 14 pairs of the same socks so that I don't have to worry about odd ones.

Strange Dream

I had a very odd experience last night. I have a vague memory of having a dream in which I had to take off my pyjama bottoms. I don't think it was a rude one but I can't be sure because that's all I really remember. This morning when I woke up however I found I had taken off my pyjama bottoms off during the night. This unnerved me rather. Plus now I'm not sure whether it really was a dream or whether I had briefly surfaced and taken them off for some reason and then gone back to sleep. It just seems such an odd thing for me to do - normally if I'm too hot I'd take my top off and when I woke up I was actually a little chilly so it seems unlikely to have been that. I don't know - I think my subconscious may be up to something.

Database hassles

Theres nothing worse than trying to grope around in the dark setting up a system you don't really understand.* I am trying to connect my website to a DB2 database but NT4 doesn't have the drivers for this out of the box so I have to fiddle round setting some up. The trouble with *this* is that once I have set them up I get an error from my data source but I don't recognize it. The DBA says that I'm connecting but then its throwing me off - apparently I probably haven't defined a DCS entry (according to his help files). How ever, I don't know what this is and have been unable to find out where it should be set thus far. The DBA's really busy so he hasn't got time to help me with it til after the database release and so I am feeling hassled. Plus lately there seems to be loads of things that people want me to do really urgently and I'm the only person working on my system so they're piling up a bit. Which means that I won't get a chance to sit down and do the background database tuning improvements for ages because those won't be visible to the users but now that I know they're there its really bugging me. Arggg. And its only 15:13.

On the plus side, I am going to a gig tonight. No-one I've seen before but described as "melodic indie stuff" so should be my sort of thing. I'll let you know. Then I'm going to have hugs (yay!)

* Yes I know there are actually lots of worst things (living in Afghanistan at the moment for instance) but none of them are actually bugging me at the moment.

(no subject)

Yay! The frustrated icon is a windoze logo! Me like!

Drugs policy

The policy

It is my position that the risks I take with my body are mine to chose. I do not see it as a function of government to tell me what I may or may not put into my system any more than it is their function to tell me my sexual orientation or what job I should do. I would also apply this to prescription drugs in that if I do not wish to take medication then that is also my right. I do agree though that is is the governments job to protect their citizens so if I am a danger to myself or others in my base state then the state can offer me a choice between detention in a secure facility or taking medication if that is the only way protection can be achieved.

The application

There is nothing (well, few things) more annoying to a mathematician than inconsistency and that's exactly what we see in the application of drugs policy. Both alcohol and nicotine are available freely to persons over the age of 18 despite the fact that they can cause people to act irrationally and/or aggressively (particularly the former) posing a risk to others or themselves, cause significant health problems if taken on a regular basis (particularly the latter) and are highly addictive. By contrast, possession of cannabis, ecstasy or LSD is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 2 years. Now I'm not claiming that there are no potential health risks etc. associated with these drugs but those health risks are not (as far as I am aware) more significant than those available freely to cigarette smokers.

The arguments

Also, finally I would just like to bitch about the way that the drugs policy has been argued in the past, particularly in the case of cannabis. The drugs tzar and others are always going on about how cannabis is a "gateway drug" and how many people who take heroin have also taken cannabis at some point in their lives. There are 2 problems with this argument.

1. Just because a large proportion of heroin users have also taken cannabis in the past that does not prove that taking cannabis leads to heroin. This is a prime example of the fuzzy logic I have complained about else where. The statistic does not say how many people who use cannabis have never used heroin and therefore is of practically no use. The only thing I can see that it helps us to conclude is that people who take heroin are likely to have taken other drugs previously - hardly a surprise.
2. The claim, as I understand it, is that the dealers use cannabis as a hook to push other more risky stuff onto people who wouldn't otherwise take it. Well if cannabis wasn't illegal then they wouldn't be able to do that would they! That problem, in so far as it does happen (see 1), is due to the government created situation cannabis users find themselves in. If they could get the stuff from a licensed bar or other retailer then they wouldn't be being exposed to criminals in order to get their supply.

Another annoying claim is that drugs use leads to crime. There is almost no way to prove this one way or the other since the criminal status of drugs a) keeps prices artificially high and hence often out of the reach of the mid/lower income person on a regular basis and b) means that people who take drugs are forced to associate with criminals in order to obtain them. As far as I am aware there is no evidence to suggest that rich London media types out of their heads on cocaine are more likely to housebreak so it seems that this argument is on relatively shaky footing.

Addendum: Since writing the above David Blunkett has decided to take an even more self-contradictory stance on cannabis policy i.e. that it will be illegal to posses it but we won't actually bother to arrest anyone for it. This means that while people will feel more free to buy cannabis without risk nothing is done to address the problems which are inherent in the criminal status discussed above - mixing with criminals and purveyors of harder stuff, artificially high prices and no quality control. This is probably one of the few ways the drugs policy could be changed which makes it more contradictory and less useful!

This post was originally posted on my website in the anticipation that I would write many more rants. In the end, I never got round to it so I'm moving it to here. The opinions outlined here are solely based on my beliefs and I'm always ready to argue/debate them - even change them!