A Time of Magic » Society

Is education becoming a more life-long experience these days

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:24:13 +0000

With the economy being in the doldrums, I’m sure that many of us have wished that we’d added to our skills base before now.

However, it’s getting easier to do that as time goes on. For instance, I’m in the midst of a two year online course which will update my computer skills considerably and have sketched out some courses for the next few years to bring my qualifications completely up to date.

Doing that kind of thing is becoming more and more an ongoing necessity these days. If your original degree is more than four or five years ago then it’s time to update it or to add to your skills base in a different area.

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Do you breast-feed?

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:13:10 +0000

Breast-feeding seems to come in cycles like many things.

After the major promotion of breast-milk a decade or so back with campaigns to make it more socially acceptable in public areas, the interest in it seems to have died down considerably in recent years. Ten years back and you’d have seen women making a point of feeding their baby in public but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it done in a public place.

Whether that reduction in the visibility equates to a reduction in the amount of breast feeding being done is quite another questions obviously. The benefits of it certainly haven’t changed and it makes a great start in life for your baby as it always has done. Is it just that it’s become less acceptable to do it in public these days?

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Preparing for the big four-oh

admin — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 15:37:27 +0000

The 4oth birthday seems to have more of a significance than any of the other “oh” birthdays largely for historical reasons: it represented the half-way mark for one’s life.

However, when you’re looking for 40th bday gifts for her, none of that matters. It’s a difficult one to call as women rarely want their age bandied about and still less so when it’s the 40th with it’s feeling of “over the hill”.

Best to steer clear of anything highlighting the actual age I think!

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Experimental blogs

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:19:13 +0000

Will I ever get an audience is a question that I’m sure a lot of bloggers ask themselves when they’re starting out in blogging.

The problem is that almost all blogs run into the sand within about three months so getting through that barrier is critical. They stop for all kinds of reasons naturally. Some find that blogging just isn’t for them and that explains a whole lot of the abandoned blogs on the various free blogging networks. Others start a very specialised blog and when whatever they’re writing about finishes, so does their blog which obviously explains a lot of abandoned travel blogs and university based blogs. Most confusing are the blogs which seem to be powering ahead and which just stop one day for no apparent reason at all.

One category must be the experimental blogs or at least those which turn into experimental ones. For instance, some years ago I started On a Postcard with the idea that it would be a collection of very short blog entries on the two broad themes of “daily life” and “something to ponder”. To be honest the idea just sprang out of the availability of what seemed like a great domain name and thus wasn’t a great reason to kick off a blog. Well, as you might expect from such a beginning, the blog ran into the sand after a while. However, interestingly one post managed to pick up a lot of traffic because google picked up the image on it as a featured image. Anyway, that set me thinking about it and towards the end of last year I revived the blog as an experiment into attracting hits via images and also of intensifying the hits by way of writing further articles based on the search terms that the blog was attracting.

How’s it doing? Well, it’s only been going properly for a couple of months now but already it’s getting a steady stream of hits relating to relationships for reasons which escape me and for cold weather clothing for seemingly sensible reasons. So, I’ve written a short sequence of posts on each of those areas to see what happens.

If this approach is a success I’ll roll it out to my other blogs in due course but ’tis early days yet.

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Getting rid of that unwanted tattoo

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:04:15 +0000

Even if you’ve put a lot of thought into the idea of having a tattoo before considering things like the design and placement, it’s still possible that at some point in the future that you will want to think about removing it.

But what does a tattoo remover actually get up to?

The problem is that a tattoo is basically designed to be permanent. It’ll certainly change over the years as your skin changes but the ink will remain within your skin essentially forever. Or, in short, it ain’t going to be an easy thing to remove.

So what the tattoo removers do is basically to erase the whole area of the design. Since the ink is within your skin this means that it’s generally going to leave a scar broadly overwriting the are where the tattoo used to be. Thus, small tattoos are easier to get rid of than large ones and the young lady’s tattoo shown here wouldn’t realistically be possible to remove.

Definitely a case of think a lot then think some more before deciding to get that tattoo.

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Sleeping easily

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:40:46 +0000

The problem with sleeping problems is that it’s often very much a family problem with one non-sleeper keeping at least one other person awake because of it.

Which, of course, means that there’s even more of an interest in sleep aids than there would be normally. But do they work? Well, yes, but that’s not the problem. The issue is that when you can’t sleep there’s generally a reason behind it, most commonly some form of stress leading to your brain not closing down normally. It’s that problem that you need to look at as sleeping aids aren’t a long term solution.

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Diet pills are confusing, aren’t they?

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:36:03 +0000

There are just too many of them and too many categories of them when you first look.

Even when you look at weight loss pill comparisons on review sites it’s still a confusing prospect.The problem there is that there is generally a vested interest in recommending a particular pill due to the commission paid. Moreover, very few of these sites have any real scientific backing to research just what would be the best pill around so there’s a tendency to recommend the most promoted product which isn’t necessarily the best one.

That’s even supposing that you know what type of pill you actually need.

Net effect is that we recently went for the simplest approach which was to choose the cheapest product on the supermarket shelf. It worked just fine for us last year. Not an overly scientific approach but definitely a low risk one: not only was the price the lowest but it’s a product that’s been around for many decades.

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Getting closer to that new kitchen

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:24:39 +0000

It’s been quite a journey but we’re now close enough to seeing the kitchen upgrade being done that we’re beginning to look at things like le creuset to complement what should be quite a modernisation of the house.

Funnily enough, the cookware is one of the areas people neglect yet it seems daft to spend thousand on a new kitchen and continue to use the old pots and pans, doesn’t it?

Fingers crossed, we’ll be out shopping soon.

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Helping reduce the spread of contact based disease

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:20:56 +0000

One of the problems in drying your hands is that there are loads of contact diseases around these days and that’s where hand dryers really come into their own.

Whilst it might seem daft to install one of these in your own bathroom in fact it’s probably one of the easiest ways to reduce the spread of the flu around your family. No more spreading of germs via the towels.

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University for all?

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:55:03 +0000

Making university open to all sounds like a great idea, but it isn’t necessarily such a good idea when you get to the point where everyone assumes that they can go to university and succeed.

The thing is that university is elitist. It assumes that you have a certain amount of brains and are prepared to work at something largely by yourself. There just isn’t the prodding that you get at school and there’s a vastly greater expectation that you can and will work along by yourself on the topics. Yes, there’s guidance, but not the hand-holding that you get in school.

Taking the extreme example, in France anyone can go to any university. This leads to the situation that the first year has a massive dropout rate, most notably in the more difficult subjects like medicine. It’s also rather demoralising for the lecturers as they know that virtually all of the students in the first class will have dropped out by the end of the year. Thus they don’t bother too much with any of them. I imagine that even getting a study group together is far from easy as the students know that most of their colleagues won’t be there by the time the final exams come around.

It is good to have universities open to all, but I think we need to get away from the assumption that this means that everyone must go to university. Potential students need to be realistic in their assessment of their own abilities. That doesn’t mean that low marks mean that they shouldn’t go to university for it may be that there are good reasons for those low grades. What they do need to be is sufficiently stubborn to carry on through the difficult times that they will encounter.

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