A friend was teaching in the local university's Drama department about ten years ago and found that most freshmen were initially hopeless when given practical tasks related to costume. Her interpretation of this observation is that they had been under pressure to perform academically for years and practised fine motor skills with nothing smaller than a pen. Those that applied themselves were able learn reasonable sewing skills.

Oh dear, my hipbone is connected to the thighbone by the acetabulofemoral joint: I must be doing it all wrong.

I suspect it's not too late to acquire adequate dexterity and sensitivity in early adulthood. It's a practical problem in neuroplasticity which probably requires little more than patience. Sort-of-relevant example: I used not to be able to move my smallest three toes (per foot) independently but I found that after holding two toes and moving the other for a few minutes a day, my toes began moving independently after about a week. Stronger example of re-mapping (mentioned by Norman Doidge in an interview earlier this year): experimental subjects were fitted with goggles that blinded them completely. Within 24 hours fMRI showed that their visual cortices were substantially repurposed to dealing with sound and touch. As far as I know the subjects recovered once the goggles came off.

Can we adapt this information to increase our chances of surviving the possible election of Donald Trump?

At the moment there don’t seem to be many biome treatments, but the recent availability of inexpensive bacterial profiling makes me hope to see some in the next decade. The British Gut Project will profile your microbiome for £75 (see http://britishgut.org./ Fecal transplants into animals have shown persistent changes to (for example) the tendency to obesity. There’s a chance Zayner will keep his improved gut health. I know that people with psoriasis show changes to the skin and gut biomes and have heard many anecdotes of symptom relief after taking probiotics, so I recently asked a skin specialist if there were any trials I could ask to join. No. For the time being abstaining from alcohol and exercising are helping and I don’t feel stuck enough to plan my own FMT.

In defence of Dyson’s dryer: I worked in 2015 for an organisation that had hand dryers from both companies and the Dysons worked far better than the Mitsubishis. The Dyson machine is nearly as good as a paper towel.

You might get improved results if you persist: it took me months to get used to standing to work, particularly when sustained concentration was required as in coding. I eventually bought a standing desk for home and (about six months after starting) feel much better for the change. One counter-intuitive suggestion: try standing on a wobble board as you work. The lightest touch of a hand on the desk will soon be enough to stabilise you - there will be a lot going on in your lower body & core but you won’t need to pay any attention to it and more than you need to attend to keeping breathing. As a fellow Slashdot reader you may be interested in the desk as a technical ‘fix’ but I would argue that fundamental changes to the way we inhabit our bodies require more powerful tools. Feldenkrais Method has worked well for me.

Another spinoff: get a red cable, get funny/

Agreed, and I have some data to support this. It’s bogus, but you can’t have everything. After noticing that my Ethernet switch and its wall wart were getting hot I ordered a replacement plus a few cables. They were brand name cables bought from Amazon. Not only is the switch faster but the cable to my main computer is red - bound to make a difference. On Wednesday, the first day the new equipment was in use, a cricket match started. For those who have not come across it, this is both a sport and a rain dance. Although I was working I kept a tab open with a cricket feed - and everything was happening far faster than anybody could believe. The match ended in less than three days - many fail to finish in the five days allowed. The red cable is probably the key component.

Today was my first time using a standing desk and I second the usefulness of adjustability. After roughly an hour standing I began to feel distractingly tired so I lowered the desk so I could sit. After about ten more minutes it was good to get back to standing, and I carried on like that for the rest of the day. I found this a surprise as I run and walk quite a lot and had assumed I could comfortably stand for longer. I felt that while standing I had more scope to move while using a keyboard, and I plan to do more standing when I have very keyboard-oriented days, whether writing a report or working with code. This pleasant experience was slightly embarassing to me as I have been saying for a while that the secret of office comfort lies not in fancy furniture but in the way we use our bodies. I have had a fairly severe Pilates habit for the last two years: after strengthening and balancing the muscles of the trunk and reducing my anterior pelvic tilt I am better able to cope with sitting. Improved flexibility in the thoracic spine also helps. There are other ways to work your body: yoga works well for some people. After today, I don’t think it’s either/or: improved exercise & awareness (I also do Feldenkrais) are very helpful but so is an adjustable desk.

I recently got a payslip emailed to me. This was full of information I didn’t want to see published and, as far as I could see (IANAL) was in breach of our Data Protection Act (in UK). I emailed the company to say that I thought this was not a good idea: it was potentially a risk to staff and gave the company legal exposure. My contact responded by saying he could stop them sending mine by email in future. I thanked him and asked him to notify information governance: if there isn’t one, then HR: no response. It worries me that the simplest data protection policies are so hard for some people to understand.

Sounds sensible. I did something similar 25 years ago by moving to Luton. The train service was fine and I was a two-minute run from the countryside. Luton house prices were lower than in surrounding towns but I didn’t have any problems in the three years I was there.

This is harder to make work than many think. I work for a local government organisation in UK, smaller than Munich, and we went part way, adopting Star Office rather than MS Office from 2005. Small document-formatting problems led to widespread exemptions from the policy: many users went back to MS Office, wiping out any cost savings. The initiative was eventually dropped. I had mixed feelings about this: good to try an alternative to Microsoft but in practice I go to work to get my job done, not participate in a software values war. Alain Williams above tells us what would be good to see but I donÃ(TM)t feel itÃ(TM)s realistic: by now most people are not expecting next year to be the year of widespread Linux on the desktop.

Our local government organisation moved over to Star Office (a close relative to OOffice in 2005. I was told in 2009 that they had more MS Office installations than in 2004. The reason - imperfect conversion to MSOffice formats when they want to exchange documents with outside organisations. The differences are generally small. They (the Council) are now giving up and moving to MS Office 2010 (at a time of tight budgets) though I hope and expect Microsoft are giving them a great price. Like the parent to this comment I like the idea of OpenOffice but that never compensated for my liking VBA more. Purists will mock - why else come here - but I think VBA is a terrific extension of Excel.

Entirely agree: I have wasted plenty of time fiddling with document formatting rather than composing text. Writing and display can be separated, and in my view often should. I put this into practice by writing in a text editor (i like BBEdit) until I am happy with the result then laying out my document using InDesign. My writing time is now devoted to the text, and the page-layout program produces much better-looking type than Word and also gives more control over the overall document design.