Time travels from left to right

It is an unwritten (but oft spoken) law of filming (whether cinema, TV or advertising) that when the character is making a lengthier journey, he moves from left to right through the picture, in other words, he is more or less static and the background moves right to left.

Apparently, we are so accustomed to reading from left to right and tracking things moving from left to right that in clay pigeon shooting, people score significantly better when the pigeon is fired from the left and significantly worse when it is fired from the right.

Recent adverts which spring to mind here are the ones for:

- The Sun, where the character walks along a high street, going through lots of mini-scenarios:

- BT Broadband/BT Sport one where the character steps up against the wall on the right, which then tilts over by ninety degrees to become the floor of the next room he marches through (I can't track it down but it's really annoying anyway).

- There was a similar one for Rightmove, the main character moves left to right through most of the scenes:


In adverts for cars, the direction is also usually left to right, but I read about a deliberate variant on this, which is when they are advertising "off-road" cars. You know, the huge ones which people use to drop off the kids at primary school and then go and pick up some shopping - how stupid were they to build primary schools and supermarkets in such out of the way places, eh? They signify "difficult journey" by having the car move the "wrong" way, from right to left.

So… if there is an advertisement for travelling backwards through time, it stands to reason that the characters have to move from right to left, hats off to YouView for giving us the example:

How did we know that he was going to say it before he said it?

From NPR:

In one of Professor Daryl Bem's studies, 100 college students were shown a list of 48 common nouns flashed on a computer, one at a time, for three seconds each. The instructions said: Look at the word, try to visualize it (see "tree;" imagine "tree") and then go on to the next word.

Afterward, they were told, Surprise! We're going to give you a quick memory quiz. How many of the words we just showed you can you recall? Students typed in the words they remembered.

Then a computer went through the same list of words and chose 24 — totally randomly; no human was involved. Before you leave, the students were told, we still want you to scan and then type the words the computer selected. As they typed, the students were, of course, committing those randomly selected words to memory. But who cares? The test was over.

Now comes the surprise. When Dr. Bem checked the original surprise recall test, a weird pattern emerged. He noticed the students for some reason turned out to be better at recalling the words they had scanned and retyped after the test. A second group of 24 words served as a control. The computer never asked students to retype them. Those words weren't recalled as often.

Then Bem drops his bomb: "The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words."

North Korea Detonates 40 Years Of GDP

I'd like to commemorate this weekend's nuclear(?) tomfoolery by referring to the article published by The Onion the last time they did this back in 2006.

In economic terms, they must be back to the 1930's at least.

Fionnuala: lost in time and space?

The Nationwide's 'Chief Economist' Fionnuala Early has kept us all entertained over the past year with her Time Travel Adventures, whereby each month's house price statistics contained the pat phrase "But house prices are still £x higher than they were y years ago", whereby x was an ever decreasing figure and/or y an ever larger one.

The Nationwide's January figures show that either the time machine has broken down or Fionnuala has simply disappeared into the ether...

Commenting on the figures Martin Gahbauer, Nationwide's Senior Economist, said "The price of a typical house fell by a further 1.3% in January, as the deepening economic recession and financial market turbulence continued to weigh on housing market sentiment and activity. January’s decline leaves the average price of a typical house at £150,501, down 16.6% from 12 months ago. The 3-month on 3-month rate of change, a smoother indicator of the short-term trend in prices, improved for the fourth consecutive month from -4.2% in December to -4.0% in January. However, it is too early to say that this marks the start of a sustained improvement in the short term trend."

Or possibly that it's just too embarassing to admit that the average price - currently given as £150,501 - will be lower than the price of five years earlier (£145,918 in April 2004) by April 2009, assuming that the next three months see prices fall by a further 4%?

Fionnuala Earley's Time Travel Adventures (4)

From Nationwide's December house price survey:

"The price of a typical house is now £153,048, around the same level as of [sic] spring 2005, but still over £17,500 more than five years ago."

From the November survey:

"The price of a typical house is now £158,442. This is about £25,000 less than this time last year but is still about £25,000 higher than in November 2003."

From the March survey:

"The price of a typical house in the UK is now £179,110, only £2,027 more than this time last year. However, prices are still 11% higher than two years ago and 47% higher than five years ago - the equivalent of a price rise of more than £30 per day for the last five years [that's £10 a day at using current figures]".

*ahem*

Prices are down 18% from their peak in August 2007, so one year's falls have wiped out the previous two and a half years' gains. By the end of this year, even the 2003 comparative will probably be showing an overall loss.

*/ahem*

UPDATE: Assuming prices fall by a (conservative) one per cent a month for the next four months, the five year comparative will be negative, or at best flat.

Who else is using the CIA's Time Travel Machine?

As I have said before, there are chucklesome similarities in the way that people with a vested interest in talking up house prices and the Global Warmenists present their figures.

It is pretty much beyond dispute that for ten years, house prices were rising and the weather was becoming slightly warmer (here in the UK at least). As long as prices were rising and temperatures going up, they could compare each year with the preceding year, and, ignorant of the fact that everything reverts to the mean in the end, boldly predict that these trends would go on for ever.

The Halifax released their December House Price Index today. While the Nationwide is still peddling the line that "House prices might be down X per cent over the last year, they are still up by Y compared to Z years ago" (to try and con people into seeing a house price bubble as a long term investment), where X has flattened off at about 20%, Y is a figure plucked out of the air and Z is an ever larger number of years, the Halifax are going on the opposite tack and are trying to con people into thinking that prices are bottoming out:

"The UK average price has returned to the level in August 2004 (£159,799)"

... or at least that they haven't much further to fall "The house price to earnings ratio – a key affordability measure - is at its lowest for five and a half years. The house price to average earnings ratio has decreased to an estimated 4.44 in December 2008 from a peak of 5.84 in July 2007... The long-term average is 4.0." Sure, but let's not forget the overshoot, back in the mid-1990s the price/earnings ratio was about three!

Anyway, I digress.

The point being that the Warmenists can no longer say that this year was hotter than the one before, because it ain't true; and while El Niño obviously contributed to Global Warming; La Niña merely "masks an underlying warming trend"*. So they have to travel further and further back in time to find a cooler year.

There's a fine exemple of this DoubleThink here:

The Met Office and experts at the University of East Anglia on Thursday said global average temperatures this year would be 0.37 of a degree Celsius above the long-term 1961-1990 average of 14 degrees and be the coolest since 2000. They said the forecast took into account the annual Pacific Ocean La Nina weather phenomenon which was expected to be particularly strong this year and which would limit the warming trend...

"The fact that 2008 is forecast to be cooler than any of the last seven years does not mean that global warming has gone away," said Phil Jones, director of climate research at UEA."What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007 with an average of 0.44 degree C above the 1961-90 average was 0.21 degree C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000."

La Nina and its opposite El Nino ocean-atmosphere phenomenon have strong influences on global temperatures. La Nina reduces the sea surface temperature by around 0.5 degrees Celsius while El Nino has the opposite effect. "Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature and the current strong La Nina will act to limit temperatures in 2008," said Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre.

* Google currently gives us 2,010 hits for that phrase. I wonder how many it will be in a few months' time?

Fionnuala Earley's Time Travel Adventures

To celebrate this month's house price falls, Ms E has popped back to 2003:

“The rate of house price falls moderated significantly in November. Prices fell by just 0.4% in the month compared with 1.3% in October. This brings the annual rate of house price falls to 13.9%, down from 14.6% last month. The price of a typical house is now £158,442. This is about £25,000 less than this time last year but is still about £25,000 higher than in November 2003."

Oh noes! We visited 2003 a few months ago, the comparison with today looked a lot rosier then didn't it?

"The price of a typical house in the UK is now £179,110, only £2,027 more than this time last year. However, prices are still 11% higher than two years ago and 47% higher than five years ago - the equivalent of a price rise of more than £30* per day for the last five years."

* That's down to £14 per day, using today's prices.

Fionnuala Earley's time travel machine still functioning smoothly

From the Nationwide's October House Price Survey, which estimates that prices have fallen by 14.6% over the past year (not adjusted for 5% inflation!):

The price of a typical house is now £158,872, almost £30,000 less than a year ago, but to put in context, still almost £30,000 more than five years ago.

So broadly speaking, adjusted for RPI inflation, you have just about broken even over the last five years, and the last year's falls have wiped out the previous four years' gains.

Fionnuala's previous adventures through time and space documented here.

Fionnuala Earley has stolen the CIA's Time Travel Machine

Ms Earley (a fitting name for a time traveller!) appears to be making liberal use of the CIA's Time Travel Machine:

If you browse the Nationwide's 2008 house price archives, you find this:

September 2008: the average house price is "60% higher in real terms than at the start of the decade".

July 2008: the average house price is "£11,000 higher than three years ago"

May 2008: the average house price is "5% higher than two years ago"

March 2008: the average house price is "11% higher than two years ago and 47% higher than five years ago"

January 2008: the average house price shows "an increase of £7,249 over the last twelve months".

Scary stuff, huh?

Conspiracy theory of the week (2)

As any fule kno, the CIA developed HIV in a laboratory in order to wipe out Africans, Afro-Americans and/or gays. I am not sure why Big Condom was never implicated, but hey, let's go with it.

Scientists have now calculated "the virus may have crossed from apes to humans between 1884 and 1924", but the CIA was not founded until 1947.

That can only mean one thing:

The CIA also invent(ed) a time machine to transport the virus back a few decades!

Scary stuff, huh?

Time travel

Here's what I posted over at Tim W, I was so pleased with it that I'll repeat it here:

"There was something in 'A brief history of time' where Stephen Hawking reckons that maybe these sub-atomic particles DO travel through time.

It is observed that sometimes a negative and a postive particle appear from nowhere, and sometimes they collide and disappear.

He likens this to an observer in a helicopter flying uphill above a zig-zag road up a mountain. The cars going uphill seem to disappear and turn into cars travelling in the opposite direction (i.e. turn from positive into negative) at the ends of the curve.

Compare the left/right zig-zag with a forwards/backwards through time zig-zag. What appears to be a negative particle flying off to the left and a positive particle flying off to the right is in fact the same positive particle, moving constantly to the right, only the first part of its journey it is travelling backwards through time, so it APPEARS to be negative and APPEARS to be flying to the left.

The point (in space and time) when the two particles appear is just the point (in space) that the particle has reached (at the point in our time) when it goes from travelling backwards through (our) time to travelling forwards.

It's probably bollocks though."