The Best Drummer in the World

It is one of those real dumb questions, well meaning but misguided. "Who is the best drummer in the world". It is like asking who is the best footballer or who is the best sportsperson. There are so many different skills and types of drumming that one person is not best at all of them. What we need are categories that we can group people into. For instance: Fastest drummer; Most versatile drummer; Time signature master; most varied playing; most driving drummer; most flexible footwork; most musical drummer; best recording production etc.
Then we can decide who we want to listen to in order to be inspired in a particular way.
I enjoy rock drummers but I quite enjoy the jazz elements that add a lot of interest to drumming. Every now and then I hear something special and something with a lot of dynamics and construction rather than a steady plodding metronome of a drum beat. That is cool.
Anyway, I am yet to hear many people touch Gav Harrison on his general ability in many areas. At the end of the day, the music sounds great and the drums are a large part. I used to think Neil Peart was real top quality but now I find his drumming for the most part was quite straight whereas Gav's is varied, versatile and interesting.

The Reason we can rely on God

I was knocking together some thoughts the other day for a friend who is having a hard time with the whole "who am i" and "what is the point of life" type questions. They have a belief in God but they don't really know how it should pan out.
Anyway, I stumbled across a few things that I thought were really significant so I thought I should record them.
I don't have the space here to go into massive depth but one of the things is that we need to understand our position in Christ. We were sinners, we come to Christ, we do not become 'good people' we merely become vessels for Jesus. This means that God has forgiven us because of Jesus and it also means the important point is to allow Jesus to use us rather than thinking we need to 'learn' how to be better people. This is human religion and does not work. It also means that you do not have to be 'good' to be a Christian. It also means that you do not cease to be a Christian because you struggle with things.
Another point was that we need to remind ourselves why Jesus died. If we can become good people (even with Jesus' 'help') His death was meaningless. He could have helped us without dying. His death is actually for our death to sin. Only by this can we be free to allow Jesus to take control.
A major thing that I guess I hadn't thought of before was about how God has based our new life on the death of Christ and on our baptism as the mechanism to move into it. Why is that important? Because it is historical fact and not based on the current state of our life. (Well at least if you are baptised). This should give us hope because our relationship with God and our Christian new life does not come and go with the seasons or our mood or situation or our trials and temptations. None of those things change anything between us and God. It means we always have a foundation, a baseline, something to rely on in all situations and it means that we can forget that damaging thought process which says that because I am feeling distant or under pressure that my relationship with God has been damaged.
It is not damaged. It might be a bit quiet but it is based on only God's plans and not on us so it cannot be damamged by circumstances. This means that we are always a few seconds away from closeness with God again. It means we don't have to reject ourselves because of our situation since God hasn't!! Sweet.

What is Democracy?

I wondered what democracy is. You might have though that it is based on the fact that if the majority of people want something then it is made so. Doesn't seem to be true though. I heard today that the government are planning to flood Google search results with non-extreme Islamic sites so that hardline ones are harder to find. The government really don't understand do they? If people in certain Muslim countries want to be hard-liners don't they have the right to do that? Isn't that democracy (as long as they don't commit crimes in other countries of course). What if they don't want democracy and want a dictator to rule everything to keep order, are they not entitled to that? What about if we all don't want the Iraq invasion, is that what happens? What happens if Christians want to believe that evolution is not true in the sense it is often reported and that God created the world, can they not believe that?
The reality is there are lots of forces dictating exactly what you can and can't do, what you are allowed to believe and what influence you actually have on the government and society. The only difference between me and someone else is that they think they are free to do whatever and I know that people are sinful and try to fit their management or government to their own beliefs about what is and what isn't allowed.
This my friends is the knowledge of good and evil, the lack of asking God about what is what and simply deciding for ourselves. It's not like we really know anything about the world at the end of the day - whoever we are.

Indirect hot water systems

You may have found on your heating system that when you have the hot water switched on and the heating off, some or all of the radiators still get warm. It seems really wrong and you might suspect a leaking 3-port valve or similar but usually the problem is much more mundane.
It is caused by hot water in the return pipe from cycinder to boiler convecting up into radiators naturally. The radiators will heat up only slowly and once the water cylinder is hot, the boiler will switch off but it is still a bit of a waste.
What can you do? You can fit check valves to the return pipes on the radiators or ideally fit less of them right next to the main return pipe rather than one per rad which might be excessive. Make sure you point them the correct way (towards the return pipe) and I would avoid double-check valves since the single check ones require enough pressure to open that I wouldn't want to overload the pump.
I did it the other day on a 22mm pipe which was the return for 3 radiators and now they don't get hot unless the heating is on.
Energytastic!

More insanity in the made-up numbers department

I was just reading this about people claiming the amount of global cybercrime outstripped the international drug trade by $1T against $400Bn. As the reporter pointed out, do they expect us to believe that the global cybercrime trade is higher than Saudi Arabias annual domestic product of $555Bn from 2007. As if.
What particularly troubled me was the comment by security firm Finjan about justifying the touting of these numbers: "In our Q1 2009 report on cybercrime, for example, we revealed that one single rogueware network are raking in $10,800 a day, or $39.42 million a year," it said. "If you extrapolate those figures across the many thousands of cybercrime operations that exist on the Internet at any given time, the results easily reach a trillion dollars."
Can anyone else see the problem here? These people are supposed to be experts and not even their statistics make any sense. I am not a statistician or an economist but let us expose the error in their logic.
1) The example they used of a company taking in $11K per day would not have been making this every day for a year. They would more than likely either been tracked down and shut down or their source of revenue would have dried up as virus-checkers are updated or stolen credit card details are blocked.
2) This example of a company would be at the high end of cybercrime. Most people who write worms either don't make any money or certainly not as much as they might want and certainly not $11 per day. How many people would really make that much in a day amongst the 'many thousands of operations'? Not many!
So the evidence that was probably "company X made $11K in a day last year" becomes "every cybercrime company makes $11K every day of every year" it has been multiplied by 365 and then by thousands. To think these people probably get paid!!

"people with nothing to hide wouldn't be so opposed to them"

I read the title in an article about Polygraph machines or 'lie detectors' and it reminded me of similar things I had read about ID cards, routine DNA testing and just about everything else that a government churns out for 'our security'. The problem is that the phrase is so common, most people won't notice that the logic is very much flawed.
The logic to the statement is based on the assumption that the piece of equipment or system is 100% foolproof. If indeed a lie detector was 100% accurate then surely only a liar would be concerned with taking one (ignoring people who might *have* to tell lies like security services or government officials protecting the public). Of course the problem is that none of these things are foolproof.
Take a lie-detector for example. Suppose you were interviewed in a murder investigation and failed a lie-detector test. The information was then presented in a Court alongside other circumstantial or inconclusive evidence. You might very well be found guilty. Take ID cards, there could be any one of a number of technical errors that might make your card read as a fake or that would enable someone to copy it and make it look you were somewhere else to where you actually were etc. Imagine the DNA information from your routine test is mis-entered or polluted into the system and 'your' DNA is then found at a crime scene. Can you imagine getting out of that by accusing the system of a defect somewhere?
Quite honestly the original statement is nonsense and I for one will ensure I do not agree to any of these man-made systems that somehow promise our security at the expense of liberty, annonymity, money and security.

Wind Energy the Truth?

I've talked before about truth. Truth is absolute in most cases but what do we base our truth on? Most of the time it is based on other people's ideas, conjecture, experimentation or even lies and what a great area to visit this than wind energy. The reason I thought about it was after stumbling across http://www.windenergy-the-truth.com/ and reading through it. The good thing about a well thought out and presented treatise of the subject is you can then try and find any holes in the logic.
It is not enough for somebody simply to say, "wind farms are a good idea" or "wind farms are a bad idea" you need all the information. You are not just talking about potentially lots of money spent on something that is less than useful but electricity supply itself and all of the industry and services based on electricity, i.e. 99% of everything. We cannot afford to be blaze about something so important and I would invite others to read the article and comment on whether the man's conclusions are reasonable or not.