Many people are not really used to share trading and so when they receive an offer to buy their shares from them just by filling out the provided form, there are a number of people who do just that. While those sending out the form may claim that it is a hassle free way of selling your shares it is in fact just the start of major hassles unless you really do like throwing money away.

Here’s how it usually works.

Let’s say you have acquired some shares from somewhere and that their current value on the share market is about $10,000. The scammers locate your details from somewhere and send you a letter offering you $4,000 for your shares. All you have to do to sell the shares to them is to sign a form giving them an irreversible power of attorney over the shares. Having done that they can then take control of the shares. In some cases you may actually receive the $4,000 that they offered you (in which case you were scammed out of $6,000) or they may never send you any money leaving you $10,000 out of pocket.

Never ever sell shares to someone who sends you an offer like that.

I have been rereading some of Janny Wurts books, mostly those from her war of light and shadow series. From what I can see there are currently eight books available with several more still to come. I currently have the first six and have just reread the first three over the past week.

One thing I do find annoying is that Ms Wurts can’t add up. In the first book a clan of about 960 is almost decimated (which would reduce their numbers to around 870 or so) but there are only about 200 survivors. If nearly 10% died (which is what ‘nearly decimated’ means) and 200 survived then what happened to the other 670 clan members who are neither living nor dead? There are similar instances where the majority of a group are left in limbo neither amongst the decimated nor the living in the following books. Could it be that Ms Wurts doesn’t know what the word ‘decimated’ means even though she uses it constantly? Perhaps what she means is ‘obliterated’ which is like ‘decimated’ but 10 times the magnitude.

When the Babylonians invented the week they made it seven days long because they thought that there were seven “planets”. They named each hour of each day after a different planet in order from slowest to fastest and then the days were named after the same planet as the first hour of each day. We still name the days of the week the same way since the names for the days come from the names of those same seven “planets” with the names still in that same order starting with Saturday as the first day of the week.

When Dionysius Exiguus invented our current year numbering in the sixth century he made a mistake in calculating when Augustus first came to power in Rome which was what he used as his starting point for calculating the birth of Jesus. As a result he was somewhere between four and seven years out. The latest Jesus can have been born is 4BC since that was the year that Herod died. Also while Aryabhata invented zero in the same Century as the AD numbering was introduced it took until the thirteenth century for that to get from India where it was invented into the west. Since the year numbering had already been in use without a year zero for seven centuries by then it was considered to be too late to go back and revise the year numbering to add it in (although other similarly drastic changes have been made to the calendar since then such as dropping several days and changing the year from starting on 21st March to starting on 1st January as was done in converting from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar).

Have been watching this on TV. They showed “Day Three” on ABC2 last night. I thought it was interesting that the 456 asked for 1/10th of the Earth’s children. There was no explanation as to why they need that many children or even anything to indicate just how many children that is.

So now need to wait to see days four and five to find out how the remaining members of Torchwood stop the 456 decimating the children of Earth.

I’ve been trying to locate copies of episodes from seasons four, five, and six of Doctor Who. Unfortunately so many of the references of the web get Doctor Who season numbers and series numbers mixed up and almost all of the results I find are actually references to Series Four which is nowhere near the period I am looking for.

I really wish they’d just continued the numbering when they brought the show back rather than restarting the numbering over again. Why don’t we just all agree that Series One should be called Season Twenty Nine and that the specials last year were Season Thirty Three and call the new episodes for 2010 Season Thirty Four instead of calling it Series Five – that would get rid of a lot of the confusion between episodes starring the 10th Doctor and those starring the 2nd Doctor.

Just reread the books “Flight of the Night Hawks” and “Into a Dark Realm” that I was given for Father’s Day last September. Purchased “Wrath of a Mad God” and another book with an Amazon voucher I was given for Christmas and it arrived in time for me to read it after I finished the first two. Now the story makes a bit more sense although I still don’t have the prior trilogy so I still don’t quite know how some characters fit properly.

A recent ad that I have noticed on TV is for a dating service. I tend not to notice ads but since this one seems to have picked a subtle way of telling people how useless their service is it kind of stuck out.

The girl in the ad is standing on a balcony saying that line from Shakespeare that people often misinterpret. You know the one where Juliet is asking Romeo why she had to go and fall in love with a member of a family that is her family’s worst enemy. The one where she asks him why he has to be Romeo and not someone from some other family that aren’t enemies.

In the ad a fellow then comes out onto another balcony and yells at her. Presumably he’s the one she’s asking the question to because there’s no one else there. Why she’d be asking him when the way that he yells at her shows that he has no interest in her I don’t know. I also don’t know why a dating service would want to imply that they can match you up with a member of some family that is the worst enemies of your family either. Such a match would always end in tragedy as it does in the original story.

Seems a good ad for telling people not to use that dating service though since the ad implies that any match they do find for you isn’t going to be a good one. Not that I need a dating service but I think the concept of one using a subtle ad that implies “don’t use us – we’ll match you up with someone completely inappropriate” is just crazy. What was the ad company thinking or were their brains on holidays the day they came up with that ad. Then again if their ad were actually promoting their service then I probably wouldn’t have noticed it – the same as I don’t notice most ads.

Just to clarify the Shakespeare reference – there is a war going on between the Montague and Capulet families. Juliet Capulet in on the balcony asking the man she loves Romeo Montague why she had to go and fall in love with him. Of course they didn’t ask why back in Shakespeare’s day they asked wherefore instead which was the old way of saying “why”.

There have been many occasions in history where it has been necessary to choose between two alternatives and those doing the choosing don’t always get things right. One example of this was the decision on which was positive and which was negative when determining the charges when rubbing two objects together to generate static electricity. The assumption was that it was the positive charge that was transferred when in fact when it was properly worked out it turned out to be the negative charge that was transferred.

Another example is when they started making movies about the Roman gladiators. At the time they didn’t have access to any historical records on what the different thumb positions meant and so they made a guess. That’s why many movies have it backwards – because the person who made the first movie guessed wrong.

What was it about the early years of the 20th Century that caused people to start associating particular colours with particular genders? Just why did they decide that it should be pink for boys and blue for girls when no such association with colour had ever existed before.

The reasons for the reversal of the two colours by German women during the second world war is reasonably obvious but not the reasoning behind associating colour and gender in the first place.

Was watching a DVD about the race to place a man on the moon. The DVD opened with the comment about the sixth decade of the twentieth century being the time when man left the Earth and first travelled to another world. That statement was of course incorrect and the person who made it had no idea what they were talking about.

How do I know this? Well I was born just under six months before the end of that sixth decade (in July 1960) and I was nine when man landed on the moon. As I was over six months old that landing did not take place in the sixth decade.

In fact man did start the journey of leaving the Earth in the sixth decade as there were a few satellite launches before the decade ended. The first man to leave the Earth was Yuri Gagarin and he did so in the fourth month of the seventh decade of the twentieth century. The first moon landing followed 99 months later with only just over 17 months of the seventh decade remaining.

That less than 100 months passed between the first man in space and the first man on the moon shows just how rapidly space technology developed during that seventh decade of the twentieth century. That they had managed two further successful landings and started some serious scientific research before the end of that decade makes it even more remarkable.