Lindsley’s blog

The current anti-US riots in Afghanistan highlight the care that nations need to exercise in this Internet-enabled world. It is easy for so-called sophisticated states to ignore how their actions are seen as being offensive to others. The fact is that there are many people and countries who are disgusted with images and videos that are freely available on the internet. We in the West may well smile and shrug our shoulders, but that is not the way in some places. We may well laugh at cartoons that lampoon religious figures, but others are horrified. In a world without boundaries, things that happen in one country are easily visible to anybody - anywhere in the world.

Every government needs to recognise this, as does everybody who puts anything on the Internet.

Still seething over the EU stupidity I recorded in January, I looked up the price of those tendon hammers in the USA. Guess what? Those dinky little bits of plastic and rubber that cost our hospitals over £5 each cost the Americans between $1 and $2. That’s £1.26, tops at today’s exchange rate. And some would have even closer ties with this overinflated behemoth? Grrrr!

With all the razzmatazz over the BAFTAs the showbiz world once again tries to convince us that only their profession enjoys such moments of achievement and public acclaim. They’re possibly right about the acclaim, because the interface between them and us - the media - is absolutely fixated with “celebs”. It’s a great pity, because many other professions have equally stunning  hearts-in-mouth moments. Just think about the completion of a major bridge-building project, or the switching-on of a complex plant. It such cases teams have laboured together for months or years and that final moment is when the fruits of their work are opened up for the benefit of humanity. Such moments are much more meaningful, important and long-lasting than those bows to the audience at the footlights.

The engineering profession needs to bring this fact to life, so that schoolchildren appreciate that it will be worthwhile, interesting, stimulating and rewarding to study maths and science.

In all the debate over the bonus offered to Stephen Hester, and then refused by him, the main issue to my mind is this: what is a given job worth?

Is the Chairman of a major banking group worth more than the surgeon who operates on somebody and saves their life, or more than a soldier who risks his life for the country? And what about the financial traders? They say that their salaries and bonuses are a small fraction of the value of the commodities they trade every minute of the day. But then what about the engineer at the National Grid’s control centre whose actions regulate the flow of electricity to towns, factories, hospitals and so on? The second-by-second flow of electricity is like the flow of electronic gold. If it’s OK for a financial trader to skim off a tiny bit of the money that passes through his or her keyboard, isn’t it equally justifiable for the Grid Control engineer to demand free electricity?