chris@25

See your GP so they can listen to your chest when you breathe just to make sure you haven't damaged the lung. Assuming you haven't, and the fracture is healing ok, they probably won't do anything other than presribe ibuprofren. You'll just have to take it easy for a few weeks, breathing in will hurt but you need to do it (don't get in the habit of breathing too shallow). After a couple of months it will be mostly better but still feel a little odd sometimes especially if you do any sport. I found it uncomfortable to have any weight on my chest for a couple of years after I cracked one of mine, but it's completely fine now after 5 years.

The trouble with the current paranoia about adults interacting with kids (let's be honest, they mean men, women aren't suspected in the same way) is that most regular, responsible and thoughtful adults will feel inhibited about interacting with kids, but the tiny number of people who may be a threat to kids won't.

I travelled to London for work a couple of weeks ago on the train for 40 quid return in first class, including free tea and coffee and a glass of wine on the way back. Can't imagine why anyone would prefer sitting in traffic. Don't get me wrong, I drive, but that's one journey I'd generally prefer the train for every time.

Yes but the Labour party has been fobbing the country off with similar garbage for a few years now... Most rights of way are across private property.

Can the council impose a public right of way as a footpath, or can this only be claimed after 20 years of use?

Dunno if it's got anything to do with the fair, but I live near the park and someone did try to break into my garden shed at 4am one day last week, so look out, someone with bolt cutters is out and about in S11...

My point is that it is a game played on both sides. Male chimpanzees fight to become the alpha of the group because they will have access to all the females. The females all mate with him because they want both his genes and his protection, but will also mate with other lowlier males (when the alpha isn't looking) to expand the range of genes carried by their offspring. So males and females are doing the same thing, basically. We are only one step removed. Alpha males don't bare their teeth and beat their chest (well they do in some places perhaps) but display their status in society in other ways. And the cave paintings were probably made by one of the non alpha males when he was depressed after being beaten up for going near a female yet again...

It couldn't be that women throw themselves at men in positions of power then? (go for the alpha male, primate behaviour again you see)

The last bit isn't quite true. Using the same analysis (it does explain primate behaviour and we are primates after all) it would be in the female's interest to stay with one powerful male while having some children with him and some with other males behind his back, because this ensures a good mix of genes and the female's genes are more likely to be passed on to future generations. So both sexes have a genetic 'reason' to cheat (and DNA studies show that around 10 percent of people are not related to person they think is their father). Quite. But there are many and varied reasons why people do things and often they don't really know why themselves. But the idea that men are bad and women are good, even at this genetic level of analysis, is balls (or, if you prefer, ovaries). Besides the whole underlying idea of this thread is as many have pointed out, ridiculous - men and women must be equally likely to have affairs, unless there's a very busy woman somewhere.

Not by me they're not! They're a similarly self-agrandising bunch of twerps if you ask me.

If everyone sold their car and bought a bike tomorrow you'd only find something else you feel the urge to protest about. I suspect it's the protesting you are really interested in, not cycling. If you want to promote cycling, this certainly isn't how to do it.

Some stupid little terrier chewed up my lad's football in Bingham park the other week, the owner was just wandering about talking on his phone paying no attention. There's signs up everywhere telling people to keep their dogs on leads, yet dog owners seem to think they don't apply to them.

I asked the council about making the narrow residential roads near me 20mph (as opposed to a one way system they were planning). The reply was that they can't do a 20mph zone without spending a great deal of money on traffic calming, so they wouldn't. Apparently you can't just put up a sign saying "20", you have to spend hundreds of thousands on creating something called a "traffic calmed 20mph residential zone" or some similar burocratic nonsense, which involves many "stakeholders" such as the police as well as various other people and loads of road humps, chicanes and other nonsense... common sense seemed not to be an option. But traffic speed cameras aren't needed, I'd prefer drivers to watch the road. Not narrowing the road would make cycling safer IMHO, along with the option to use the pavement around awkward sections.

Jessop Wing = Jessops... still city centre. Oh sorry just read that again. No ante-natal at NGH? I didn't know that. Doesn't that mean that Labour have gone against their own policy somewhat?

I don't understand how the provision of "modern health centres" in a deprived area of the city will make everyone in that area healthy when it seems the better off area across town with better health outcomes manage fine with the "outdated" GP surgeries system. To take the example you quoted, smoking during pregnancy, everyone knows you shouldn't do this anyway, if people in one area are more likely to do so then elsewhere it's got nothing to do with the provision of ante-natal services. Besides, in terms of the main hospital based ante-natal care, it's all based at the Northern General (next to some relatively deprived wards) or Jessops (in the city centre). There is none in the more affluent south, so how does that account for the different outcomes between north and south Sheffield? You could take smoking in general. More people in poorer areas smoke. It's not that they don't already know it's not good for their health, so spending money on new health centres isn't going to do anything about that. Same with housing - there's no intrinsic difference between the late Victorian terraced houses in, say, Crookes and those in, say, Darnall - or for that matter all the ones that were demolished in the 1960s in the east of the city to be replaced by cheap concrete council housing that was pulled down and replaced again in the 90s.

I could never understand how only fixing potholes in poorer parts of the city was supposed to magically make those areas less poor; wouldn't they still be poor but just with smoother roads?

Isn't that a bit like saying you shouldn't buy a car until you've paid off your mortgage?

As there seem to be two or three libdem councillors on here nowadays I hope they will consider the following: as there is no local election next year, there is an excellent opportunity to take some sensible long term decisions instead of needing to turn every issue into a '"we'll do the opposite of the other lot" slanging match (which unfortunately seems to have been Mr. Scriven's strategy recently, as a libdem voter I'm not happy about that). In this instance, moving the market stalls from the Moor to Fargate will only lead to Fargate ending up as run down as the Moor. Either find somewhere else for them (well away from the only decent shopping street in town please) or tell them to bugger off to Rotherham. Who needs their knock-off goods anyway?

Try the Guardian link from above: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/29/grandtheftauto The game is set in a fictional city's underworld. Are you saying you've never watched The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, Pulp Fiction, etc..?

In the early 80s there was a lot of nonsense talked about "video nasties". Nowadays we all accept that you can watch movies at home on DVD even though some of those movies might not be suitable for kids. Games are just the same, the media commentators will grow up eventually and stop equating the words "video game" with "kids". As others have said, GTA4 will be bigger than any Hollywood blockbuster, and it's British. Anyone that buys it for their 12 year old nephew is a retard, it says 18 on the front.

The problem with this country is we've lost confidence that we can improve things. Something's wrong in the culture so we either do nothing or do something cheap, and can't conceive of building something that would actually add to the environment (although we used to). We seem to be nation of lawyers and accountants, when we used to be a nation of engineers and industrialists.

Whilst I agree with the thrust of your argument, it's not fair to blame "scientists" for eugenics etc. The problem is utopian thinking, which can be set off by ideas from science, politics, economics, religion, etc... it's the utopianists that are the problem, not the ideas that they latch onto.

Unfortunately I think some of that is wishful thinking and doesn't take human nature into account. Most of the wars in the 20th century for example weren't as a result of shortage of resources but were the result of ideologies trying to spread themselves. These ideologies were advanced as the way to utopia, and in everyone's interest, the only problem being that some people didn't know what was good for them and so they had to be forcibly convinced. For example, Karl Marx sat down in the British library and wrote that industrial society would be fairer if the means of production was owned by a larger group of people. 150 years later well over 60 million people had been killed (by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) as a direct result, because the forces that religion thrives on were still there and just transferred to this new ideology.

That doesn't explain, to take one example, our current government's liking for "faith schools", nor the anti-scientific mumbojumo of the environmental movement when it comes to GM crops or nuclear power, nor the media classes taking religious groups' rantings against stem cell research seriously, or the irrational media scares about MMR or mobile phone radiation... and all that's without worrying about the apparently highly infectious islamist (western revolutionary theory with islam replacing marxism) meme that's doing the rounds...

Unfortunately it seems things are going the other way if anything.