Paved with, er, palladium...

The streets of London are paved with gold

Well, if not actual gold, other stuff that’s more expensive, pound for pound. After sweeping the streets and extracting the more obvious recycling materials to the point where only dust is left, they go to work on that dust, recovering platinum, palladium, and rhodium, which have hi-tech uses, as well as a little gold.

The spokesman for the cleaning company was refreshingly straightforward in a scientific community that has increasingly obfuscated matters behind their over-complication: do you want to die out on a scorched planet (carbon fuel); do you want to die of radiation poisoning (nuclear power); or can you, perhaps, Mr and Mrs NIMBY bird-spotting retard, put up with those wind turbines that represent a threat only to the occasional passing seagull and your view of the hills? Them’re the options, whatever the professors of this and that, particularly those paid by the government or energy companies say.

Cleaning bloke said that either everything goes to landfill, as before, or it gets recycled, which is much better all round. In what sounds like a belated admission that the Dusseldorf model is the way to go, everything is collected, recycled, recycled for a lesser use, burnt for energy, that energy is used to fuel the processes attacking the leftover dust, as are some acids and other chemicals recovered from the dustcarts, to recover the remaining rare and expensive metals in that dust.

League tables for eleven year olds

I don’t see what the fuss is about. Nope, a 45 minute test isn’t exact, but few things are exact. If your guide to what’s worthwhile is what’s exact, then stop teaching the humanities and focus entirely on maths and the sciences, and certainly abandon religious education.

The do-gooders were in full glass half empty voice:

The bottom 10% will get an inferiority complex.

Do-gooders: some deserve an inferiority complex. It might inspire the best of that 10% to do something to move up the percentiles.

The bottom 10% will abandon academic studies.

Do-gooders: not all the top 10% will be academic by nature or inclination. Why does living in the physical world rule out being intelligent? Or is it because do-gooders tend to be physical dyslexics? Note their inability to tolerate one person running faster than another or being better equipped to earn a fortune at sport than a nine-stone weakling (ahh, bless).

The bottom 10%...etc., ad infinitum…

Do-gooders: don’t the top groups get a boost? Sit the exam. Take the results on the chin. Stop the whingeing. Same for everyone.