Helmintholog

Sometimes, all that fiddling with computers at home pays off extravagantly. My copy for this week’s wormseye got lost over the weekend. I am in New York; the house is deserted; I didn’t have a version on the laptop (because the synchronisation of Windows folders is guaranteed to break when you really need it).

But I do have on the linux box at home automatic backups taken every couple of hours of everything on my real machine. And I can SSH into that from the trusted address of the pair.com account, even though the backup directories are not visible to any normal we or ftp server. So, to get the backup copy into the guardian, what I had to do was

new york hotel -> SSH -> Pair.com
Pair.com -> SSH -> Saffron Walden
my spare room -> FTP upload -> pair.com

and then on another connection log into darwinwars from here, download the file, open it, copy the text, and email it to Ros Taylor. What I am really proud of is that I did all the hard bits with command lines and without any coffee at all. And that I had had the foresight to fix things up so that this could be done in an emergency, even thoguh I had not thought through the details.

Now I have to do what I came here for. But I’ve had coffee. I don’t care.

Can anyone think of an explanation for the fact, (via) that, when they are asked to identify the top two recipients of federal government spending, 49% of Americans list “Foreign Aid” as one of them? And, no, it’s not a case of attitudes hardening under Bush. The same pollsters (Harvard and the Washington Post), asking the same question in 1997, found 64% of Americans believed that foreign aid was one of the two most expensive things their government does.

I think that overestimating the amount of our money going to foreigners probably happens in all nations, whether they are proud of their foreign aid, or resent it. But I can’t believe that the discrepancy is as wide anywhere else.

In largely unrelated news, the Guardian today reports that there are 110 nukes stored at the American base in Lakenheath, about thirty miles from here. It seems to me that just one would be plenty to deter anyone who wants to bomb Suffolk. The rest of them aren’t really making the world safer.

Actually, these stories may not be entirely unrelated. Given that Americans tend to believe that their armies abroad are benign, and helping the countries that they are in, perhaps the distinction between “defence” — correctly identified by 74% as among the largest parts of government spending — and “foreign aid” is not as clear emotionally as it might be. At least in the case of Israel, the largest recipient of foreign aid, the distinction is hard for anyone to discern.

But I still think it’s a remarkable delusion to be so completely wrong about the figures involved.

Where does the grease on spectacle lenses come from? When spectacles get dirty and smeared, they have an oily sheen if you look at the lenses side on. Breathing on them, then buffing with a cloth, as I used to watch my father doing, has no real effect. the only way I have found to get my spectacles really clean is to wash them in soap and warm water. Perhaps there are other methods known to real spectacle wearers?