RIP Sir Patrick Moore

Maybe it is good - but I am deeply sceptical about it in reality. Doesn't it offer yet another way to bring medics who do not conform to heel? It might identify some of them as not applying the current orthodoxy - even when what they are doing might work better. Would revalidation actually have detected Shipman?

Mind, it probably will help to clear out some of the very worst idiots. Sometimes, though, you have to write your own ripostes on the BMJ to highlight them to others!

I'd noticed. ;-)

As one of the roughly 50,000 people in Britain who are responsible for safely carrying many millions of people on public transport per week, most of my colleagues and I do at least try to keep up with the various changes. So do most of the million or more lorry drivers. It's only self defence, as knowing the rules means you're less likely to beak them, so you're more likely to keep your licence..

Seat belts for very young kids isn't something I meet on a regular basis, but the information is in my notes somewhere, and it's definitely available in the transport office

As for being up to date on other changes, that depends a lot on when you passed your test and how recently you read the Highway code, which doesn't mention such things as the new weight limits for having a tachograph in your van and a proposed change in speed limits for vehicles between 3.5 and 7.5 tonnes.

In 1977 someone sequenced the entire genome of a virus. It was the first time anyone had done any organism of any sort.

Now you can do a human for a couple of grand, and they are talking about doing population studies with mass sequencing.

Yes, they go out of date.

Andy

Yes thats a bus driving "licence", its not the same as a degree in physics from Cambridge. Once you have that then you've got it for life!...

Of course the do they hold a "pilots licence"

Are we talking about the same thing?...

I spent ages wondering why my son, who knows all the dinosaur names, never mentioned the brontosaurus. Then I found I'd been lied to. Bastards.

That's "just" the rampant ageism in the UK.

What! No brontosaurus? You and me both then! Grrr....

But at least when I started A-Level chemistry the first thing the teacher said was "Forget everything they taught you at O-Level, it's wrong".

They will use Chris Lintott, then maybe take a 'summer break' and then just forget about the whole thing.

...along the lines of Sir Patrick Moore annoucing 'if you are watching this on your tv then I am dead and if you are watching the repeat then I am still dead

But at 64 they don't help a lot ;)

Well it depends what you do after, dunnit. My degree is Physics, with a postgrad course in CompSci, both from Imperial. Physics was 1967 but I've done nothing with it since then, because I moved into computing and later, networking. Those are the fields I kept up in, but not by formal training. You learn on the job, essentially.

Then when you arrive at Uni, they say the same again ...

Then you do a PhD and get to demonstrate that what you learned as an undergrad is wrong ...

W-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-llll. My BSc is in biochemistry, and I never did it professionally, but I'm still interested in the subject, used to subscribe to Nature (when it was available through work) and still read stuff about it occasionally. But I am by no means "current", since I've worked with computers since 1975, a subject I do stay current in, since that's how I make my living.

Experience is worth a lot more than a degree in many cases. Which is why a lot of degree holders can't get jobs. Even the minority non mickey mouse degrees. It's more an intelligence test.

I think there's a lot of beaurocrats out there makes a good living out of inventing rules to cover non existent problems. Especially in the EU.

Are you thinking of "Baldrick"? (Tony wotsisname.)

All depends on the consequenses of being out of date. With doctors obviously it can be serious.

With medicine the gulf between what is known (as in, at least some researchers understand) and what is understood by the practitioners is so vast that an individual GP's falling behind seems almost trivial - despite being of life and death importance.