• In part wasted £23 billion of our money on a failed track and trace system.
• Paid consultants £7000 an hour, none of them seemed to have told her about school level science about viruses mutating or the 2nd wave.
• Was surprised when more testing would be needed in September, when the schools were forced to open.

"None of us were able to predict a new variant would occur." - Dido Harding

"We've seen the virus mutate…which was something none of us were able to predict." - Dido Harding

A total and complete record of failure. Track and Trace failed, 59% of contacts reached? £23 billion down the drain? Unfortunately all too typical of this government and their complete and total failure to deal with coronavirus.

Why the private sector, why not the NHS and why Dido Harding?

Tory ideology and nepotism, this whole crisis has seen them award billions to private companies that fail to deliver results, all while systematically under-funding and breaking up the public sector. These companies seem to have a habit of being closely linked to the Conservative Party - so these contracts are not even being awarded to businesses fairly. Need ferries from a company that has no ships? No problem mate, here ya go, £60 million. Need a functional track and trace system? Oh thanks mate. Who cares if it doesn't work? As long as the donor money keeps coming in. Got a Tory minister on WhatsApp? Just send a message and see what you can get.

Dido Harding doesn't exactly have the most amazing track record, a good stint at Woolworths in 2009 (when they went bust), and a long run heading up TalkTalk, when they suffered a cyberattack resulting in hundreds of thousands of customer's data being leaked, and ended up costing them £80 million. Never mind though, in the same year she was put into the House of Lords, thanks to David Cameron. Who she attended Oxford with. How she end up at Oxford? Well she is the granddaughter of Field Marshal John Harding, 1st Baron Harding of Petherton. Oh, did I mention she's been married to a Tory MP since 1995?

We need to get this government out so we can actually get some talent running the country. Dido Harding, sorry, Baroness Harding, Chair of NHS Improvement and NHS Test and Trace is not qualified for the job. None of them are, and their record of failure should not be tolerated. I know its hard for Brexit Britain to understand, but we need the best people in government, not the worst + their WhatsApp contacts.

We had acid rain in the 80's. That was quickly followed by the o-zone layer. Why are these two things never mentioned today?

Climate change is a mere excuse to tax us to death.

Dave, referring to past environmental "scares" attempts to paint global warming with the same brush, well at least his mental version of this brush, thinking they were merely fads which just went out of fashion. Seemingly unaware that acid rain is an on-going problem although one we have tackled relatively effectively through the use of scrubbers to filter out sulfur, nitrogen oxides, etc and the odd international treaty here and there.

The ozone layer is however the classic example of what we can do internationally to solve something, and should be used as an example of what to do to tackle global warming. We spot that the ozone layer is eroding due to the release of CFCs into the atmosphere, in 1987 we ban the use of CFCs and today, we have an ozone layer that is gradually recovering.

Above all else it shows how dumb some of these global warming deniers are, seemingly unaware about acid rain, and worse yet the ozone layer. But I suppose that's what you get when you have people who think it's hotter at the equator because it's closer to the Sun trying to understand climate science.

The star to the lower-left of Jupiter is Iota Capricorni. But if you look closely you can see two other "stars" either side of Jupiter. They're not actually stars but two of Jupiter's moons. To the left is Ganymede and to the right is Callisto. The above image has over-exposed the Moon to show the tree around it. The somewhat green flare opposite the Moon in the image is the reflection of the Moon caused by the camera's optics.

Below is a close up of Jupiter.

In this image we can see a third Moon, just poking out around the left limb of Jupiter, this is Io. There's another large Moon that is normally visible and that's Europa, but yesterday evening when these images were taken it was on the far side of Jupiter.

Well nobody, recently Saturn entered its equinox, meaning the Sun is directly above the equator. As the rings are in the same plane as the equator, they receieve much less light showing only an edge on profile towards the Sun.

This happens every 14.8 years as it travels around the Sun but this is the first time we've had a spacecraft in orbit to capture it. The above image is composed of 75 different exposures, and has had the rings brightened to make them more visible.

For the full size, ideal for wallpapers hit the Cassini imaging website.

No special equipment is required to watch the shower, which occurs when Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Yeah that's fine.

The meteors appear to come from a point called a "radiant" in the constellation of Perseus - hence the name Perseid.

Yup that's fine.

Astronomers say up to 100 meteors per hour are expected to streak across the sky during the shower's peak.

One person won't actually see 100 per hour, maybe three or four people looking at different parts of the sky might see closer to that sort of number.

But this year, light from the last quarter Moon will interfere significantly with the view.

Yes it will.

Astronomers say binoculars might help with viewing the spectacle, but will also restrict the view to a small part of the sky.

No sane astronomer would ever say that, you'll never see any meteors through binoculars. Don't bother even bringing binoculars with you, unless you plan to have a look at the Moon (best to do once you go outside so it doesn't ruin your dark adaption), or some of the open clusters in the region.

While being good generally, there are a few exceptions, obviously we can see the Sun has a disc as its so close to us compared to other stars. And assuming you have a large telescope, something like the Very Large Telescope in Chile, you can resolve about a dozen other stars as discs, R Doradus is one of the larger ones and so is Betelgeuse, the bright star in Orion's shoulder. Here's the new image taken by the telescope, I've drawn on Earth and Jupiter's orbit to give a sense of scale.

Over the 20 years or so we've been able to see the disc of Betelgeuse, we've noticed its shrunk in diametre by about 75 million kilometres. Discovered in the image above is the halo of gas surrounding the star. Confirming what many have suspected, its getting on in years and has started its collapse, meaning it could go supernova within a few thousand years, ideally it'll go supernova in about 6 months time - but I doubt I'm that lucky. When it does it'll be visible in daylight for weeks and at its peak it'll be brighter than the Moon.

Anyway check this out:

When it enters its lower mapping orbit, the images will get even better with two or three times the resolution.

The Daily Telegraph for example says "Meet the first astronaut to fly to space under the British flag". Errr not quite.

I know what they're trying to distinguish between, the several British-born astronauts who have all been US citizens, and an actual British citizen, but it seems they're forgetting Helen Sharman, who is a British citizen, and flew under the British flag.

She went up to Mir in May 1991 onboard Soyuz TM-12 and performed medical and agricultural research. As part of the Juno co-operation agreement between the Soviet Union and a number of British companies, unfortunately it had to be in partnership with private companies as the Tories had prevented any money being used for manned spaceflight in the mid 80s. Despite fears of the mission being cancelled after the private companies failed to come up with the money to pay for the seat, some people namely those evil commies in the Soviet government understood how freakin' awesome spaceflight is and so made up the shortfall themselves, allowing the mission to go ahead.

And before anyone says then it was under the Soviet flag, here's the mission insignia clearly showing the British flag, and having English writing on it.

You might think people would spend 10 seconds doing a bit of research before writing their misleading headlines, but apparently not.

Hello (hidden e-mail address), thank you for your comment on my blog.

Unfortunately I can't see much, if any connection between science and the word of god. There's no evidence to support the Earth being made from Ymir's flesh, or the mountains from his bones or the rocks from his teeth and jaws, or the seas being created by his icy blood. Nor any evidence to suggest that the stars, the Sun and Moon are the giants of the North and the South.

As for your remarks on white supremacists, I am somewhat confused. Europeans enslaved Europeans thousands of years before enslaving Africans. You don't need to setup a condition where whoever you're enslaving has to be sub-human. As we can see throughout classical civilisation, owning slaves was perfectly normal for the ruling classes regardless of whichever race happened to be involved in - you just need to setup the concept that owning people is acceptable, attempting to base a moral position on science is always a risky business as we saw the best science of the 19th century showing how closely related Africans and Europeans actually are, and not how distinct and seperate they are, as it turns out being seperated only by 50,000 years.

The prevailing mood in the 17th and 18th centuries among the slave-owning religious community was that they were separate species, and this provided the justification used against those who opposed it for the slave trade. This persisted right up until the civil war in the United States, where the largely religious southern states fought against the abolitionists of the more secular northern states.

Evolutionary theory unified all life on Earth, there's nothing different about us, we are all descended from the same self-replicating molecule, the genetic alphabet is the same in every species on Earth - the differences are trivial compared to our oneness with each other.

The default scientific position on the origin of life is obviously that life came from non-life, but this is nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution, which assumes we already have life.  We call this abiogenesis. Clearly we are here today, so this probably happened. To suggest a super-natural, extremely complicated entity being involved is much more unlikely than natural processes occurring and creating a molecule which could make copies of itself, and as such the burden of evidence would be upon those who imply a super-natural, complicated entity to prove its existence and role in the origin of life. To date no such evidence has come forward, in addition to that the implausibility of such an entity coming into existence itself - being far less likely than a relatively simple molecule coming into existence that can make copies of itself, practically places such a hypothesis on a level almost equal to that of an impossibility.

You'll notice I don't say it is impossible or never ever. In science we don't have absolutes, anything can change in light of new evidence.

Science is also not a god. Science is a method of understanding the world, a method for generating ideas, and then the testing of those ideas to see if they're actually real and exist in the real world or not. God on the other hand is a super-natural all powerful being that some humans speculate is actually real. They seem pretty different to me.

The prevailing mood in the scientific community is also that life changes - most obviously there are species alive today, like horses which weren't alive 100 million years ago. Back then we see completely different species, and we see gradual changes from species alive then, to species alive today. An example of life changing today can be seen in strains of flavobacterium that can digest nylon (an artificial substance). In the middle of the 20th century there were no bacteria that could digest nylon 6 - because it hadn't been invented yet. However this strain of flavobacterium evolved a new gene, a gene which enabled the digestion of nylon.

Obviously a chicken never gave birth to a giraffe - the two species are separated by over 100 million years of evolution. However we do see chickens giving birth to chickens that are slightly different to their parents, and we see giraffes giving birth to giraffes slightly different to their parents, like we see with all species. Over the course of millions of years these differences mount up. You mention chickens, cows and dogs. Just 10,000 years ago these species were considerably different to how they are today, since we domesticated them, we've been artificially selecting them as opposed to naturally selecting them so that traits we want survive, and the traits we don't die off and become extinct.

Evolution is not a religion, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is a scientific theory that describes the origin of species and their unity with each other. Just like how the Theory of Gravity describes how mass affects other mass in the universe, or how the Germ Theory of Disease explains, well, diseases. By scientific theory I don't mean guess, a theory in science is an idea which is backed up by evidence, and in the case of evolution it is backed up by a lot of evidence.

To say evolution is ungodly - whatever that means - is silly. Evolution explains how species change overtime. It says nothing about any gods. To say it is racist is in my opinion even more silly - there is nothing else I know of in all of religion which so brilliantly explains how life on Earth is so closely intertwined and related to each other.

Threatening me with burning in hell for all eternity isn't going to do you any favours. I can quite easily say that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will taunt you for all eternity with His Noodley Appendage. I hope you agree with me when I say such groundless remarks do not add to the conversation.

My belief, if you want to call it a belief, in evolution is based upon the prevailing scientific consensus that has existed over the last 150 years on the matter. How you could associate that with foolishness is beyond me, especially when you are unable to offer an alternative hypothesis to explain the diversity of life we see on Earth today, let alone any evidence to support it.

Again thank you for your comment.

So let's start things off with a gorgeous image of an aurora (aka the northern lights) on Saturn.