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The other day, I was involved in a disagreement with a so-called "expert" who shouted me down, saying that seatbelts are indisputably safe for all toddlers and that parents of children with leukemia are "just a bit mad".

This is in the wake of a study that found a positive correlation between wearing seatbelts and childhood leukemia! Admittedly, the study has been discredited, but I've heard stories about parents taking their child to hospital in a car, wearing a seatbelt, and being told that their child had contracted leukemia. Coincidence? I don't think so.

This is another typical response from those bullies who don't want us to protect our children from leukemia. It is simply irresponsible to assert that seatbelts are appropriate in all cases, and to shout down anyone who disagrees as somehow educationally subnormel.

Some children have an allergic reaction to peanuts. Most don't. Does that mean you feed peanuts to all children? Of course it doesn't. In fact, most schools have banned peanuts. So, by analogy, we should also ban seatbelts. And watching television, reading, crossing the road and

Do you see what I did there? I took two unrelated concepts - one of which is a safety measure, and one of which is a tragic illness, put them together and - hurrah! - I look like an idiot.

Link : I'm not a scientist.

I've come up with a brilliant way to encode the written word in such a way as to make piracy virtually impossible.

The idea is this.

eBooks, as they currently stand, require two purchases - the purchase of the reader, and the purchase of the eBook itself - the classic separation of content from player. So far so good. This allows the content provider and copyright owner effectively to reproduce the content as many times as it wants, and sell licences to as many people as want the content. Tying the user in to a particular player creates built in obsolescence, so eventually there will be a resale opportunity where the eBook you want to read is no longer compatible with your hardware, so you have to play it again.

The bReader combines player and content in a way that effectively forces the reader to purchase both at the same time - leading to the purchase of one book player for every book purchased. This is good, because it means that the text of the book is hard-coded in to the player rather than being delivered via the internet - true, there is a loss of immediacy of delivery as a solid bReader must be delivered rather than just content, but this means that the content itself is never stored online. As no encryption or DRM system is entirely unbreakable, this drastically reduces the opportunities for piracy.

Indeed, the storage mechanism within the bReader will be analog, so there is no quick way to rip content from the device. True, analog:digital conversion is possible, but it is intensely time consuming and will almost certainly require the destruction of the original bReader.

There are also opportunities for re-selling content. Users may view bReaders as disposable, so they may not retain the content indefinitely. bReaders can be mass-produced cheaply in low quality, so they fall apart after a period of time. It is anticipated that some users would even purchase new bReaders to match existing bReaders on their "bReader shelf" as we are tentatively calling the bReader Storage Environment (bse).

Some may say that replacing eBooks with bReaders is a fanciful solution to a problem that doesn't exist. But isn't that the point?

Cadbury is being bought by Kraft Foods.

Many people see this as a bad thing, it seems. Setting aside the 185 year history, the Cadbury family's groundbreaking interest in the welfare of its workers, and the whole "sale of a British company to a Colonial power" side of things, there's an important question here.

What will the impact on Dairy Milk be?

It's not as if Kraft are not already in the UK chocolate market. They delight us on a regular basis with Terry's Chocolate Oranges and Toblerone. They also bring us Kenco coffee, and Philadelphia cheese, market leader in the white cheese spread market. But I digress.

Terry's Chocolate Orange is known for two things. Firstly, it tastes almost entirely unlike oranges, or chocolate. Secondly, it is impossible to break pieces off nicely. Oh, you can try, but there's always the spindly bit down the middle. The most effective way of breaking a Terry's Chocolate Orange apart is by the insertion of a blade in to a convenient fault line - hence, presumably, the reason why knives are a popular fashion accessory with many of our nation's youths.

Toblerone fortunately come in handy "miniature" sizes these days. They used to only come in 1kg bars, designed to look like the alps, and with mountains that neatly "snap off". I never managed to get one to snap off. Plus, the only way to eat them was to shove a whole triangle in your mouth at once, or risk losing a tooth - tricky when you are six, let me tell you. However, I suspect that's where many people learned how to dislocate their jaw at will, a skill which can make you popular in certain circles, I hear.

So is that the future for Dairy Milk? Increased solidity to the point of being impossible to break?

It seems today that all we see is violence in movies, and death on television. I've been to the cinema twice in the last week, and both times the movie showed a broken world, post-apocalyptic and bleak. And I've not even seen The Road, which is supposed to be even worser than those.

All very gloomy and doomy. Even Being Human is looking more drama than comedy - although a show in which one of the main characters is dead is either going to have serious overtones or be a Classic comedy. Then I get home to the horrors of Haiti. There is a definitely dark vibe in the air.

Fortunately, I am enjoying Glee. A show about life's great shallownesses, a show that while being partly Ugly Betty has a good chunk of Pushing Daisies and even Ugly Betty when it was at its most camp.

I'm hard-pushed to guess at the target audience for Glee, though. It's too cynical to be aimed at the Disney Market, and too camp and cutting to be aimed, really, at anyone other than Gay Men in their 30s to 50s. Not that I'm complaining about that...

The "Supernatural-Comedy-Drama" is a curious beast.

Writers and showrunners often find it hard to balance the components - make it too funny and the dramatic elements are ineffective. Make it too dramatic, and the comedy feels forced. In the case of the recent episode of Doctor Who, make it too sentimental and leave hundreds of hungover fanboys scratching their heads. But I digress.

Being Human - season 2, episode 1 - was always going to be an interesting one to watch. The first season tied up a lot of the plotlines from the pilot, leaving the question of "where next?" - and the second season picked up a month later - with some characters having found closure, some having found new wounds. The episode set up new threads for the new season, while at the same time re-establishing the characters and their desire to be "normal" humans.

I'm a big fan of the fantastic, magical-realism style writing. I like worlds which are almost real, which could be happening just around the corner, and which reflect on our own reality in metaphorical ways. Being Human manages to stay just on this side of the line beyond which lies pure escapism. It succeeds because it is less about vampires and werewolves and ghosts, and more about the problems of fitting in to society when you feel slightly out of it. I think most people feel that at some point in their lives.

BBC one, possibly the nation's most popular channel, interrupted its regular programming last night to bring us a half hour bulletin about the weather. It turns out it's been snowing - a fact which might have escaped me had it not been for the fact that it's been bloody freezing for weeks and there's snow outside. Everywhere.

Due to the lack of competition from other channels, I sort of sat through this, mainly trying to work out what it was for.

Officially, the line from the BBC was that they'd had a huge amount of interest in the weather - an extra four hits on their weather site, people wanting to get travel news and so on. All fair enough, because the local situation affects local people. That didn't really square with what was, really, just an extended news programme.

The content was interesting, though. A lot of human interest stories. Praise for the emergency services. Horror stories of people trapped in snow drifts, power cuts, exploding drains, rabbits caught in headlights. This news programme was designed to make you feel better about being at home, on your sofa, watching television, sandwiched between Nigel Slater and Zoe Wanamaker.

It will probably turn out to be the most popular programme of the week - half mogadon, half schadenfreude.

Scotland doesn't grind to a halt when it snows.

Everybody has a happy glow
Let's dance in blood and pretend its snow
Even Mao Tse-Tung is under the spell
It's Christmas time in hell!

It's that time of year again, when things start grinding to a slow, inexorable halt. The shops, running low on powdered egg again. And in the queue at the post office, the terrifying pleasure of being trapped between two women who were discussing the Direct Debit™ issue. For thirty minutes.

The issue being, simply, that they don't trust them. They've never had anything go wrong with them, but they just don't trust Direct Debits™. They've seen Watchdog, they know that sometimes Direct Debits™ do go wrong, and yes, it can be pretty hellish getting them sorted out again. So they like sticking to cheques, or in this case popping in to the post office for a nice chat, a moan about how long the queues are at this time of year, and a lengthy and tiring chat about how her daughter wants her to go back to BT, but she really can't be arsed with them. That was her word.

90p stamp, sorted.

He came by again, the following Thursday.

The same routine, a sharp double-knock on the door, a polite "Excuse Me, Miss Sanderson, if I may" as he stooped to step over the threshhold, not waiting for confirmation, passing Ophelia his hat as he so did. And then a "Cup of Tea? That would be most kind," as he escorted himself down the narrow hallway and in to the front parlour, where he sat down in Grandfather's chair, all without so much as a "Please", or a "By your leave."

Ophelia was not impressed. Far from it. Nonethtless, she scurried off to the scullery, placing the Homburg carefully on the chair at the foot of the stair, and popped the kettle on to the stove.

The question arose - as it had the time before - should she poison him?

The first time, it hadn't really been a serious thought, just an idle whim as she noticed the rat poison pushed in behind the caustic soda and the tin of refried beans. She had disliked him immediately; the pushiness of his manner and the grim ashen severity of his features had done little to change that reaction. Later, after he had gone and she had heard her father sobbing, she had vowed to bar the door to him should he revisit.

And yet, he had been polite and firm, and she had reacted in the same way a second time. This time, though, she reached for the rat poison as the kettle came to the boil.

How much would be enough?

They never warn you that in your forties, your eyebrows will take on a tufty life of their own, gradually but firmy reaching out with eyebrow tendrils, desperately trying to join up with their demonic cousins, the tufty ear hair.

No, they just tell you that mascara can make your eyelashes eighty seven times more alluring.

Who plucking cares?

In the brave new world, Scottish independent television "STV" is crap.

A significant proportion of their home-produced programming is irrelevant twaddle, mistargeted and underadvertised. Low budgets mean cheap programming, endless cheap magazine programmes, repeats of programmes about weaving in 1920, and imports of shows that are low-cost either because they were made in other low-cost markets, or because they were rubbish and flopped in their original markets.

There are exceptions - popular programmes such as Coronation Street and the X Factor still air in Scotland, although Scots can't vote in the EWNI X factor. They can vote in the Scottish equivalent, which is about finding a song for Scotland's Eurovision. It's faintly embarrassing, but it has helped to revitalise Lulu.

The main reason for showing these shows is to try to stem the tide of illegal streaming, or watching ITV London on satellite rather than STV. It backfires, because many people just retune and stop watching STV altogether, while the standards of STV programming plummets even further due to dropping advertising revenues and the high blackmail cost paid to keep Coronation Street on Scottish screens.

There are mumblings in the press.