DUFF & NONSENSE!

A Great America Hero - but do I love him or hate him?

Ladies and Gentlemen, please bow your heads to the memory of a truly great American  - I give you the late Mr. Eugene Polley.

Who?  Eugene Polly?  Never 'eard of 'im, I hear you mumble.  Such ignorance and only this blog, with a little help from its friends, in this case I Hate The Media, can drag you blinking into the sunlight of knowledge.

Eugene Polly was the inventor of the 'do-flicker-thingie'!

Need I say more?  Waddya mean, you don't know what a 'do-flicker-thingie' is?  It's that bloody 'thing' with buttons which always, but always, goes missing when you are desperate to switch channels on your 'telly' because the big match is about to start!  You end up with the wife screeching at you to hurry up as sofa cushions are thrown into the centre of the room in  your desperate search.  Time is ticking away as you strain your back lifting the furniture to find the wretched thing.  Finally the wife huffs off to the kitchen to make tea because she can't stand your filfthy language and then shouts through that it was in the kitchen where you inadvertantly left it on your last visit!

But even then your troubles have not ended.  Rushing back from the kitchen with the 'do-flicker-thingie' firmly in hand you hurl yourself into your armchair and - start pressing buttons!  Because you see, you never ever quite got the hang of the 'do-flicker-thingie', did you?  Despite insisting to the wife that you were to be in charge of it lest she flicked over to one of those soppy soaps.  Anyway with increasing desperation you keep pressing buttons which takes you through children's programmes, Indian radio stations and - natch! - inadvertantly landing you on a porn site just as the wife returns from the kitchen - and, equally natch! - it's a homosexual one!

Well, there is a tendency always to remember when the 'do-flicker-thingie' went missing or failed to behave and so we forget the zillion times it was there on the arm of your chair and no doubt some 14-year-old nerd is already working out exactly how many manhours were saved by this excellent device.

So here's to you, Eugene Polly, and I just hope no-one misplaces your urn the way I constantly do your 'do-flicker-thingie' .

 

Consider the atom!

Oh, go on, give it a try!  I know it's Sunday morning and you're sitting slumped there regreting opening that extra bottle last night, but try it, just think about atoms.  Pesky little critters, ain't they?  So simple and yet so unbelievably complex.  I am moved to these ruminations because, yet again, I have fallen foul of that little imp - coincidence.

Yesterday I was re-reading Michael Frayn's superb play Copenhagen because there is just a tiny chance that I may be able to direct it next year.  The play concerns the 1941 meeting which took place between Neils Bohr, the Danish-Jewish 'Godfather' of quantum physics, and his favourite 'pupil' and supreme genius in his own right, Werner Heisenberg.  The play takes place in the spirit world because the particpants, including Bohr's wife, Margrethe, are all dead.  They meet to try and agree on the nature of the meeting which took place at such an ominous moment in history.  Ominous for both Bohr living as a Jew in occupied Denmark, and for Heisenberg who worked under the baleful eye of the German authorities who could not forgive him for having taught 'Jewish science' at university.  Ominous for the rest of us because 1941 saw the first moves in the race to develop the atom bomb - and Heisenberg was the team leader on the Nazi side investigating atomic possibilities.  Frayn is far too intelligent not to enjoy the irony that the participants of this meeting are unable to agree on what was actually said because they are all beset with uncertainty!  An excellent play and worth reading even if reading play scripts is not your usual litarary fare.

The other half of my 'atomic coincidence' was re-reading part of David Bergamini's WWII history book Japan's Imperial Conspiracy in order to prepare my talk on "How Japan Lost WWII in the First Six Months" which I am thinking of recording for those of you having difficulty in sleeping at night!  It reminded me of the little known fact that the two bombs employed used totally different mechanisms for splitting the uranium-235.  In the first bomb, small particles of uranium were held at one end and at the due moment were fired down the 'tube' to a larger piece of uranium at the other end thus setting off the chain re-action.  Hence its nickname of "Thin Boy".  The Nagasaki bomb, on the other hand, employed a different means in which the large piece of uranium was surrounded by smaller pieces which were driven inwards by explosive force to set the chain re-action going.  Hence its nick name of "Fat Boy".  This is the sort of totally useless information for which this blog is famous the length and breadth of my attic!

The other little-known fact of which I was reminded concerned the A-bombing of Nagasaki.  Not too many people know that Nagasaki was not the original target, that was to be the intended fate of Kokura, which lay in a conglomoration of industrial towns in the southern-most island of Japan, Kyushu.  It is a delicious irony that will be completely missed by any 'Greenies' that the thing that saved Kokura was pollution!  President Truman had laid down strict instructions that the A-bombs were to be dropped under visual rather than radar observation in order to avoid mistakes.  The smoke from all the factories around Kokura hid the specific aiming point for 'Fat Boy' and after several efforts it was decided to go for the secondary target of Nagasaki.  Bergamini reckons that if Kokura had been hit the death toll would have been at least 300,000 of the 600,000 who lived in and around the area.  As it was, the plane turned for Nagasaki and at this point yet more 'atomic uncertainty' enters the picture!

As the crew approached Nagasaki they saw considerable cloud formations and an argument began as to whether or not to disregard orders and use radar to identify the target - they were running low on fuel and time was of the essence.  Reluctantly permission was granted but suddenly Bombadier Beahan sighted a distinctive stadium through a gap in the clouds and he shouted to the pilot that he would take the plane in.  He asked for a slight alteration in course and then, at 10.58 am he released 'Fat Boy'.  But, Bombadier Beahan made a mistake and dropped his bomb more than two miles off target!  Directly beneath the bomb the destruction was total but because of the geography of the surrounding hills large parts of the city were shielded and only - only? - 40,000 perished, perhaps half of what might have been.  Yet more uncertainty arises as to whether or not Bombardier Beahan deliberately made his 'mistake' or whether perhaps he had been given a nod and a wink from higher up the chain of command.

Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle seems to apply to history as much as it does to sub-atomic particles.

 

One picture worth a thousand raindrops!

On this occasion, need I say more except thanks to Watts Up With That via I Hate The Media.

 

Photo by Delemere Lafferty

 

Schrödinger's pussy!

Well, I knew Schrödinger was pussy-mad because he kept banging on about that poor old pussy that he insisted be locked up in a box until some particle - or was it a wave? - anyway, something happened down at the really, really titchy level of existence and either poor old Tibby was dead or she was alive and no-one would know until they opened the box.  He won a Nobel prize for that but frankly I would have thought it was dead obvious - no pun intended!

However, according to a review by Nicholas Blincoe(*) of John Gribbin's latest book, "Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution", the rascal kept forgetting High Science and instead went looking for Low Pussy!  Very low, in fact, because at one stage he fancied his neighbour's 14-year-old daughter, he impregnated a famous actress of the day and had to be warned off the 12-year-old niece of a friend!

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked - but suddenly quantum physics has become just that bit more interesting!

(*) Blincoe's review is in today's Daily Telegraph but there does not appear to be a link at the moment.

(**) Via the comments below, Nicholas Blincoe has kindly sent the link to his review: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9188438/Erwin-Schrodinger-and-the-Quantum-Revolution-by-John-Gribbin-review.html

 

"Seek and ye shall find!"

Well, two posts down I asked and, lo, Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek answered!  For those with short memories (and who wants a long memory for the sort of rubbish you find here?) the question I posed was "Why do they keep changing things- sod it?"  And here is the answer:

Mind you, I have no idea what that little 'gizmo' is that he's holding in the second picture and as for actually making it work - well, my dears, simply too, too embarrassing!

 

'Dear Lord, don't make me good, make me lucky!'

My title seems to be the default prayer today for more and more people, men and women, in all stratas of our society.  You might care to add to my title, 'And, Lord, don't let me be found out!'  I do realise that old men are prone to wailing that things aren't like they used to be and so I should make clear that I don't believe there has been some sort of golden age in which honesty and probity and straight-dealing was the order of the day.  Even so, it seems to me that simple, old-fashioned notions of virtue seem to have almost disappeared.  Ethics, in so far as it exists anywhere, seems to be confined by large organisations to ensuring that no-one indulges in racism!

In the last few years I have spectated the goings-on in the dismal non-science of climatology in which politically (I use the word in its widest sense) committed 'scientists' have bent truth to suit their agenda.  When they were found out, various committees of 'the Great and the Good' were wheeled in to whitewash their behaviour.  Just yesterday, I pointed out the disgraceful fact that 47 out of 53 supposedly 'scientific' papers on possible cancer cures were found to be impossible to replicate.  In our civil service, our local authorities, our schools, our universities, our police, our media industry and, above all, our parliament and government, we find a constant practice, almost amounting to a deliberate policy, of lying and cheating.  I would remind you that, despite appearances, these dishonest activites are not conducted by 'organisations', they are executed by individuals, people - people like me and you!

Whilst I cannot claim with any certainty that such corrupting and corruptible behaviour never occurred in earlier generations, I think I can claim that at least there was a sense of shame involved.  The perpetrators knew they were doing wrong. Today, I rarely sense that in the behaviour of the lying liars who hold positions of influence in our society.  Whether it's a teacher giving her pupils hints on the exam questions to come, or a public employee 'throwing sickies' as often as he or she can get away with, or a managers of large corporations being 'economical with the actualité', or a 'scientist glossing his experimental results, everywhere and all the time people are lying through their teeth.

So why, I wonder, has the notion of ethical behaviour, of honesty, almost totally disappeared?  No doubt part of it is the loss of Christian teaching to the very young.  Whatever one might think of Christianity as a corporate body, so to speak, no-one can gainsay its fundamental teachings on personal virtue.  However, the loss of the ten commandments has been matched by the growth in political ideology in which ends justify means.  Examples of this are too numerous to list and they exist on both sides of the political divide.  Well, as individuals, of course, our power is limited but we do have dominion over ourselves.  So perhaps we should remind ourselves of Shakespeare's words:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves

Or, perhaps the words of many of my old school teachers, "Could do better!"

 

It's not just bankers who are corruptible crooks

Anyone with even a slight knowledge of the charlatanry that has been exposed in the so-called 'scientific' world of global warming will suspect already that the phrase 'scientific ethics' is now an in-house joke.  Of course, many learn-ed opponents of the 'warmers' have dismissed them as not being truly scientific at all in the rigorous sense of the word, but now I read of  behaviour in a branch of very real science and, moreover, unlike so-called global warming, this is one of critical importance to us all.

According to a story at Yahoo News, a former Head of Research at Amgen, a huge international biotechnology company with headquarters in California, has announced that during his ten years in this position he checked out 53 "landmarked" papers from reputable labs published in top medical science journals under their supposedly strict rules which govern checking and peer-reviewing of new scientific papers.  The man concerned, Glenn Begley, said that of those 53 papers making claims that such and such a procedure had efficacious results in the treatment of cancer, 47 of them were impossible to replicate in laboratory tests!  Another giant bio company, Bayer, had similarly pathetic results according to the Yahoo report:

Scientists at Bayer did not have much more success. In a 2011 paper titled, "Believe it or not," they analyzed in-house projects that built on "exciting published data" from basic science studies. "Often, key data could not be reproduced," wrote Khusru Asadullah, vice president and head of target discovery at Bayer HealthCare in Berlin, and colleagues.

Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year. Bayer dropped the projects.

Begley suggests that there is in the scientific community a widely held belief that anything published in a prestigious journal must be right and reliable.  Nothing, apparently, could be further from the truth which, I might add, any old global warming sceptic (er, like me) could have told them years ago!

The problem goes beyond cancer.

On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent.

Ferric Fang of the University of Washington, speaking to the panel, said he blamed a hypercompetitive academic environment that fosters poor science and even fraud, as too many researchers compete for diminishing funding.

Ah yes, that naughty 'F' word - Funding!

"The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high-profile journal," said Fang. "This is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior."

The academic reward system discourages efforts to ensure a finding was not a fluke. Nor is there an incentive to verify someone else's discovery. As recently as the late 1990s, most potential cancer-drug targets were backed by 100 to 200 publications. Now each may have fewer than half a dozen.

"If you can write it up and get it published you're not even thinking of reproducibility," said Ken Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. "You make an observation and move on. There is no incentive to find out it was wrong."

All of which brings us back to bankers who appear to be on a par with medical research scientists!

 

"There is providence in the fall of a sparrow"

Another of those creepy coincidences about which I wrote a few days ago.  Last week I read a long article by James Bamford at Wired.com providing details of the zillions of dollars the Americans are putting into new facilities which will allow them not only to monitor and store every single electronic action in the USA but also most of the rest of the world as well.  In building these capabilities they have to bear in mind that electronic communications world-wide are expanding at a phenomenal rate.  You do not need to read the following quote if you don't want to, it can be summarised as: big, BIGGER, BIGGEST:   

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale [the site of the facility] is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10²⁴ bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Most of this ocean of information (in fact if you think of each piece of info as a raindrop in the Pacific Ocean it will give you some idea of the scale of the enterprise!) is of absolutely no interest.  However, as any good intelligence man will tell you, that doesn't mean it's never going to be of interest, so a wise security agency will always hang on to it just in case!  And whilst it might be necessary to sweep wide, it is even more important on occasions to be able to dig deep:

The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

Needless to say, in this 'computer race', the equivalent of the Anglo-German naval race before WWI, the 'enemy' keep improving their techniques:

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (10³⁶).

According to Bamford, in the great competition between the code makers and code breakers, the former were winning hands down.  Hence, the multi-zillion effort to develop ever bigger and faster computers which, if what Hamlet said is true, that "there is providence in the fall of a sparrow", then pretty soon not only will these listening devices hear the fall but they will even hear and record the faint sigh of its last breath!

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.

Legal quibbles concerny the privacy of US citizens which in the Bush years kept the MSM squawking like startled chickens are now ignored.  Bamford records one NSA scientist who approached the White House on Obama's inaugeration and told them of the threat to privacy was given a polite brush off!  So much for the difference between liberals in opposition and liberals in government.

Back to my original comment on coincidence, this morning our MSM are squeaking about similar threats to the privacy of British subjects whose electronic messaging is, according to the government, going to be monitered by GCHQ, our equivalent of the NSA.  Cue the usual suspects leaping up an down in protest, including, I'm sorry to saythe normally sensible, David Davis MP. It is worth noting, and I am grateful to Richard North of EU Referendum for reminding me,  that the government announcement of its proposals in this area does not actually come out of the blue.  The EU issued a directive on this activity back in 2006 and recently have indicated that they will be formulating new directives to all member states to bring these procedures up to date.  In other words, in this case, as in others, HMG is just doing what it is about to be told to do by Brussels!

I have run out of time so I will return later to discuss why I do not necessarily feel threatened by these procedures and what safeguards need to be established so that governments do not take advantage.

A wicked parody

And you can take the word "wicked" in my title either in its traditional meaning of extreme naughtiness or in the contemporary sense, as used by our 'youfs' and 'youfettes', as being really rather admirable.  It will depend on your view of the parody itself.  However, first of all let me give you the object of parody.  This is the famous, and rightly so, poem by Henry Reed written in memory of basic weapon training in the army during WWII.  You have to imagine (or in my case, remember, because nothing much had changed in the 15 or so years when I had to sit through this) a warm Spring afternoon with recruits half listening to a weapons training NCO repeating the same lines he has delivered a thousand times before.  As a poem it stands on its own merits and seems to have remained a favourite even with many people who never experienced that particular situation.  I find it tremendously evocative and moving:

NAMING OF PARTS by Henry Reed

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
          And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
          Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
          Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
          They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
          For to-day we have naming of parts. 

Well, that's the original poem and now here is the the 'wicked parody' which is sharp, deadly accurate and very, very witty.  My thanks to Bishop Hill for finding it on another blog, and even greater thanks to a commenter called 'Sleepalot' who wrote it:

SCARING THE PROLES by 'Sleepalot'

Today we have scaring the proles. Yesterday,
We had narrative writing. And tomorrow morning,
we will be taxing them into the dirt. But today,
Today we have scaring the proles. CO2 bubbles
harmlessly through coral reefs east of Papua New Guinea,
And today we have scaring the proles.

This is the adjusted temperature data. And this
Is the residual anomaly, whose use you will see,
when you are given your graphs. And this is the raw temperature data,
Which in your case you have not got. The trees
stand unflinching, steadfast against all adversity,
Which in our case we have not got.

Now this is the graph, and you hold it like so,
And you cover this end with your thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone grinning. You can keep a straight face,
if you have enough faith in the Cause. The daisies
shadow the lawn with their leaves, never letting anyone see
Any one of them grinning.

And this you can see is our model result. The pupose of this
is to extend our reach. As you see, We can change these
parameters just as much as we please: we call this
building consensus. And rapidly backwards and forwards,
the advocates are alarming and corrupting MPs:
They call it building consensus.

They call it building consensus: it's easy enough
if you can keep a straight face: like the trend,
and the scale, and the narrative, and the tipping point,
which in our case we have not got; and the skeptics
excluded from every arena, and the advocates going backwards and forwards,
For today we have scaring the proles.

How about that as the very best joke to read on April 1st?!

 

Is intelligence like pornography?

You remember the old adage that it is impossible to define pornography but you know it when you see it!  Well, I am wondering whether intelligence is the same.  This whole concept of 'intelligence', as in the IQ assessments I touched upon in the preceding post, has been going round and round in my brain.  What is it, exactly?  How do you define it?  How do you measure it?  Does it only exist in one part of your persona or does it permeate your whole being?  Needless to say, my own fairly moderate intelligence only took me so far in seeking answers!

Most people, if asked, would equate intelligence to 'book-learning' or success in academic fields.  Alas, it only requires a nano second of thought to start listing the really stupid 'stoopids' who are weighed down with 'book-learning'.  One instantly thinks of Gordon Brown, one of the few men in the country who actually understands "endogenous growth theory" but who demonstrated without doubt his total inability to run a whelk-stall!  Even so, as I understand it, he has now gone on, in a very 'intelligent' way, to build a new career in which he will earn considerable amounts of money and enjoy a very exciting, international life-style.  So not totally unintelligent then!

Perhaps we should infer that intelligence is partial, that it can appear in one part of your life and be missing in other areas.  Well, that's pretty obvious from everyday life where one observes otherwise educated and 'intelligent' friends with good careers who then enter into disasterous marriages which are blindingly obvious to all the witnesses but not to the participants.  So, if that is the case, what is the point of measuring 'intelligence' unless you can pinpoint where it is working inside a person?

And how do you meaure it?  I have never taken an 'intelligence' test so I am not qualified to judge their efficacy.  I assume they are a series of increasingly difficult 'problems' which people are asked to solve.  The problem here is contamination.  The tests are 'designed' by people who may or may not be very intelligent themselves, and they are marked by those very same people!  Whilst some of the tests might be of a mathematical nature with a right or wrong answer, I suspect many of them are really matters of judgment and, I would remind you, the judgment of the testers is on the line as much as that of the testee, so to speak.  Is my lifetime's refusal to take any sort of intelligence test a sign of my intelligence?  Or lack of it?

Perhaps - no, almost definitely - I have the wrong end of the stick.  Perhaps it is not the ability find a right answer which these IQ testers are after but the evidence that the 'testee' is actually attempting to think of a way through to a conclusion whether it is 'right' or 'wrong'.  I suppose there are many (most?) people in this world who fail to think on a medium or long term basis and merely act on short term considerations.  We saw a few thousand of them doing so during the recent riots.  Were they unintelligent?  Not necessarilly, I would suggest.  If you are greedy for fashionable electronic goods which you cannot afford and you see a shop being ransacked, it is not unintelligent to help yourself.  Fleetingly you might do the intelligent thing and think of the consequences but were you to do so you would assume that the powers of the authorities to find each and everyone of the perps is limited and even if caught you know from experience that it will be an easy doss in jail - and you will still have the goods you nicked stashed away for when you come out.  So quite bright, really!

Now let us examine the long-term thinkers.  Are they more intelligent?  Take a young man who has set his sights on a career as an officer in the Royal Navy.  He knows that certain exam results will be required and that he will have to dedicate his life to this chosen path which has little equivalence in 'civvy street'.  Part-way through his career the government cuts the Royal Navy to shreds and he is out on his ear, middle-aged and with none of the right qualifications to gain employment at the sort of remuneration level he has been used to.  How intelligent was that?  Perhaps that example teaches us (the obvious) that being intelligent does not guarantee success.  In which case, why set such store by it?

In considering this subject of intelligence I am reminded of Mr. Cruddas, the unfortunate 'Get Rich Quick Merchant' who was the subject of a Sunday Times investigation into Tory donors.  He is a man with absolutely nil academic qualifications who, by circumstance, found himself in the right place at the right time.  He quickly turned his ability to understand and use the latest communications wheeze - at the time it was teletype or some such - and had the imagination to realise its wider applications.  He set up what was, in effect, a 'bookie's shop' in which foreign currency dealers could quickly and easily bet on price fluctuations.  He made a million, or to be precise, several hundreds of millions!  Was he intelligent or was he - and I deliberately used the word earlier - simply imaginative?

At this point I turn without shame to my Thesaurus because, the English language being such a tremendous tool for the expression of thought that I wanted to lay before you some other words for 'intelligence': wisdom, thinking power, intellectualism, wit, common sense, understanding, cleverness, gumption, sagacity, discernment, acuteness, shrewdness, foresight, craftiness . . .  and so on and on.  Again I ask, in this ocean of words and subtle differences of meaning, where-in lies 'intelligence'?  What is it?  How do we test for it?

And that, of course, brings us full circle!

 

When academics fall out - watch out!

Why is it, I wonder - and not for the first time - that when academics fall out it makes a WWF bout look like a tea party?

The two gentlemen above, Mr. Chris Jericho and Mr. Shawn Michaels, and I stress for reasons of self preservation as well as strict accuracy that they really are absolute gentlemen to their fingertips, could well be replaced by these two gentlemen below.  In the blue corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Prof. Daniel Everett, the new kid on the block threatening the crown of the world heavyweight champ of linguistics, Prof. Noam Chomsky, know to his friends and comrades as 'Lefty'!

Another question I frequently ask myself is why so many otherwise intelligent men of science having in their youth overthrown the orthodoxy then pass into intransigent middle or old age insisting that 'the science is now settled', thus ignoring the entire history of science which is a never-ending tale of orthodoxy after orthodoxy being severely unsettled!  Still, at least in this dispute over linguistics you will enjoy the self-hugging delight in the irony that the entire subject of linguistics is so abstruse as to be almost incomprehensible to anyone outside the discipline!

Personally, I blame the Pirahã!  Not their fault, of course, because they sound like a rather intelligent tribe of people living in the depths of the Brazilian forest.  Rather sensibly, they have no religion and no hierarchy, not least because they also lack any sense of history or the future.  In other words, they do what we, er, advanced peoples are constantly told not to do, that is, they don't even think of the past and don't plan for the future because there isn't any!  The other thing the Pirahã lack is a sophisticated, or even a mildly complicated, language - such bliss my friends would mutter, not to hear Duff droning on and on and on - and in certain situations like hunting they communicate by whistling.  Anyway, the poor old Pirahã were minding their own business when suddenly Prof. of Linguistics, Daniel Everett, enters their domain.  Even worse than being a professor of linguistics he is also a devout Christian and is intent on converting them all.  After a few years, rather sensibly, Everett gives up his Christianity and concentrates on learning their language which is, according to him, amongst the most basic and under-developed ever found before.  As he gets to grip with the Pirahã's alnguage he realises that it is, and excuse me if I become slightly technical here, non-recursive.  In other words, their sentences are so short and to the point that they lack the ability to insert sub-clauses into their sentences.

So far, so tedious and so what, you might ask?  Well, it was upon this discovery of a language which was non-recursive that the linguistic brown stuff hit the fan!  You see, 'Lefty' Chomsky who, as I told you, is the World Champ in this division, had laid it down from on high that all - repeat ALL - human language, being a product of the human brain, is recursive.  Oh dear, academic handbags at dawn then ensued and continues until this day.  You can read all about it, complete with very recursive sentences, at The Chronicle for Higher Education.  It's a long-ish piece but worth reading not least for the unintentional but delicious ironies on display.

 

Dammit! Now the Germans are doing 'irony'!

Isn't it enough that the Germans regularly out-produce us, out-design us, out-sell us and embarrass us at our national game of football?  Must they now destroy our much-loved notion that they have no sense of humour and that like all foreigners they don't understand irony?  It's really too much when one of them produces an essay on 'Greenery' that had me chortling and chuckling as the irony positively dripped from every paragraph.  I blame Alexander Neubacher at Der Spiegel.  I am about to paraphrase him in my usual sneak-thief fashion and, honestly, you would do much better to pop over and read the whole thing - simply too, too delicious!

He begins by writing German rubbish - no, that's not quite right - he's writing about German rubbish, in particular, the utterly brain-dead stupidity of the 'Greenie' madness that controls it - as it does here!  To give but one example, amongst the plethora of different coloured bins into which 'free citizens' are forced to segregate their rubbish is one for plastic.  This is duly sent to the re-cyclers who dutifully recycle exactly 35% - and then incinerate the rest!

Herr Neubacher also tells of the non-stop agit-prop  indoctrination government advice that is aimed at everyone but especially the young in order to get people to use less and less water.  It has worked.  German water consumption has fallen enormously.  And the result is an equally enormous stink because now there is not enough waste water flowing through the sewers to clear, er, the waste!  I think even we know the dangers of the new 'Green' lightbulbs.  Being very exact, as they are in Germany, they conducted a test in which a bulb was smashed inside a room and the mecury level measued 5 minutes and then 5 hours after the event.  In both cases the levels of this highly toxic element were above limits especially for children and pregnant women.  Needless to say, these 'eco-friendly' bulbs are so hazardous that it required the design of a special machine to suck out the dangerous mercury which then has to be packed in special containers and buried in a mountain - thus providing future Germans with another problem!  God knows what happens over here.  I suppose they could dump it all in Liverpool and they'd all turn green but no-one would either notice or care!

Finally, he describes the unforseen ignored problems which have beset old buildings which have been lined, inside and out, with thermal insulation and which are now erupting in mould and damp patches.  Herr Neubacher finishes on a surprisingly mild note:

People who shop in organic grocery stores, eat a vegan diet or drive an electric car are free to do so. But this should not give them the right to lecture others on the environmentally correct way to live their lives. Things are sometimes more complicated than they seem at first glance.

Yes, yes, Neubacher, that's all very well and good but remember your heritage!  Just take every third 'Greenie' outside and shoot him!  That will soon solve your problems.

 

It's all in yer serotonin transporter gene, innit!

I don't quite know what to make of Joan Chiao, from the department of psychology at Northwestern University.  As far as I am concerned anyone from a psychology department anywhere must have a beard and constantly play with a yo-yo as they babble mostly nonsense.  Ms. Chiao being a female of the species might find the beard bit tricky!  On the other hand, I am full of admiration for the lady in publishing in an American university a piece of research that is blatantly racist.  How she has escaped tarring and feathering by the ever-vigilant 'thought police' and 'language commissars' , I do not know.  Anyway, according to The Mail, she and her colleagues have been investigating cultural sterotypes (SHLOCK-HORROR - don't tell the 'Graun'!) and they have paid particular attention to the differences between "British individualism and Chinese conformity".  Actually, I suspect the "British" slant is emphasised by The Mail because, well, because it's The Mail, innit!  I think Ms. Chiao and her learn-ed colleagues were comparing western culture with the Chinese and other Asians.

Racial, or even national, traits are a very complex and slippery subject.  For a start, much belongs in the eye of the beholder.  Even so, it is Marxist nonsense to suggest that such traits do not exist at all.  In a way investigating such things is similar to the study of gases which are measured not by the individual actions of each and every molecule but by mathematical averaging.  The difference, of course, is that in gases the molecules never alter but people are forever changing to the intense irritation of politicians. 

Even so, Ms. Chiao maintains that the individuality she observes in western people should be compared with the conformity of the Chinese.  Oddly enough this chimes with some thoughts attributed to the late Mr. Jobs of Apple fame who maintained that the whole computer revolution of recent times could not have occurred anywhere else but the free-living, free-wheeling and free-dealing society of California in the last three decades.  By implication he was saying that the Chinese were only good for copying not inventing.  Ms. Chiao, in effect, confirms that opinion by telling us of their investigations into the genetic differences:

Chiao and her colleagues combined data from global genetic surveys, looking at variations in the prevalence of various genes. The findings were matched with other research which ranked nations by levels of individualism and collectivism.

 So which little genetic 'critter' was to blame, if indeed, blame is involved:

The team focused their attentions on the gene that controls levels of serotonin, a chemical in the brain which regulates mood and emotions.

Their studies found that one version of the gene was far more common in western populations which, they said, was associated with individualistic and free-thinking behaviour.

Another version of the same gene, which was prevalent in Asian populations, they said was associated with collectivism and a greater willingness to put the common good first.

Why is it, I wonder, when I read articles like that the one word which keeps drumming away at the back of mind is - bollocks!  I don't know but perhaps it's something to do with my serotonin level!

 

They seek 'em here, they seek 'em there . . .

. . . they seek those damn neutrinos everywhere! 

Do you remember those pesky little neutrinos who had the infernal cheek to, as it were, stick two fingers up to 'our Albert' and go ever so slightly faster than the speed of light?  Well, you can say what you like about the 'swots' but they do have an excellent sense of humour, even if it is somewhat unintentional.  The particular 'swots' concerned spend all their time buried under a Swiss mountain chasing neutrinos - I know, I know, what a way to spend a life! - and when the little critters went faster than light it caused an emotional breakdown amongst the team.  First, there was elation that they had, in the proper Popperian manner, falsified a theory; quickly followed by trembling anticipation of the bucket-loads of offal likely to be deposited on their heads when it was found that the Swiss cuckoo clock they used for timing was one 'koo slower than it should be and therefore gave a false reading!

Consequently, a suitably Swiss-like announcement of total neutrality was issued merely reporting 'the facts, Ma'am, nothing but the facts' and promising that rigorous checks would be made on the cuckoo clock and all the other equipment.  The result, announced a few days ago and reported by Reuters, was so deliciously quantum physics-like as to be hilarious and indeed some people swear they heard the ghostly laughter of that great prankster and humourist (as well as Nobel Prize winner) Richard Feynman.  You see:

The scientists at the Gran Sasso laboratory said tests on the equipment used in their experiment had led to two question marks over its sensational results, because of problems with possibly faulty cabling and separately with a timing mechanism.

The first "could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos" while the second could have resulted in "an overestimate," said the statement by the Italian laboratory's OPERA group of neutrino specialists, relayed by the CERN particle physics research centre in Geneva.

The latest turn in the story, which set the scientific world in uproar when it first broke last September, left the basic question - did they or didn't they? - unanswered, with more tests set for the coming weeks and months.

My apologies to Reuters but they are wrong.  The basic question has been answered, and indeed, it has been answered in perfect conformity with what I understand to be the very essense of quantum theory, that is, the naughty neutrinos went faster than light and slower than light - simultaneously!  See?  It's simple, really!

And if that convinces you that I'm as daft a brush let me quote Feynman:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

As for 'our Albert', in anticipation he recorded his response years ago:

 

Who the hell cured the sun's acne?

Someone is to blame!  Normally ( a relative term, I know) 'the sun has got his hat on' -mostly to hide the fact that his face is covered in spots.  I gather that amongst the swots there is some disagreement as to the exact effects here on earth of these fairly regular outbreaks of acne.  But I have no doubts whatsoever!  Our sun is so enormous compared to the mere speck that earth represents in comparison that if it so much as coughs, we're history!

 

Now here is another similar chart showing sunspot activity but over a longer period and I would like you to pay particular attention to the early years of the 19th century:

 

And here are a few quotes from The History of British Winters:

1811: A late start for severe winters in the 1800s, but January of 1811 saw the Thames freeze, once again!

1813-1814: [...]  One of the 4/5 coldest winters in the CET series. [...]  A frost fair was held on the Thames, possibly the last 'great' one. The frost began in late December, approaching the new year. [...]

1816: Known as the year without summer, snow fell very late on, and the summer never recovered. [...]

1819-20: Severe winter. -23c was recorded at Tunbridge Wells [...]

1821: Late May saw snow in London, probably the latest snowfall there until 2nd June 1975.

1822-23: Severe winter, ice on the Thames by late December. February 8th saw a great snowstorm in Northern England. People had to tunnel through the snow.

I have said it before and I will say it again - go long on Long Johns!

I am obliged to Anthony Watts - again!



I suggest that we abort Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva with immediate effect!

I am obliged to 'SoD' (Son of Duff) for sending me the link to this Telegraph story which reports that the two brain-damaged (that's my description not theirs) mouth-breathers in my title call themselves 'medical ethicists'.  Before I contemplate an action under the Trades Descriptions Act, I had better tell you what this pair of latter-day moralists have to say.  In essence, they ask, why should babies who have actually been born be disqualified from abortion?  Being a man of generous, not to say, kindly disposition my first thought was that they were using an argument which philosophers describe as reductio ad absurdum. 

In the never-ending dispute over abortion it is an extreme example of an argument I have used myself in the past which goes something like this: at what point, exactly and precisely, does a bundle of self-reproducing cells change from being inhuman to being human?  I ask because, of course, that would decide whether an action to kill the cells was a moral abortion or a murder.  I have yet to hear from anyone, expert or not, who can tell me the precise point at which the change occurs.  Given that uncertainty, I have always maintained that abortion (except in a very small number of specific situations) should not be permitted.

So, in my innocence, I assumed that these two 'medical ethicists' were making my point (in extreme form) that unless you can point to some measurable factor upon which we can all agree that it demonstrates humanity, then the mere fact that a foetus has been expelled from a womb does not necessarily make it human.  Silly naive chap that I am, of course, this pair meant nothing of the sort.  They were being absolutely serious and published their views in a comic calling itself The Journal of Medical Ethics:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

There you go, just drop it on its head, that should do it!

"Oh, brave, new world".  Someone pass me a sick-bag.

 

Matt Ridley puts his money where his mouth is!

As most of you know, Matt Ridley is a distinguished and aristocratic academic, a convinced but practical libertarian and a decided sceptic on AGW.  Any one of those, of course, makes him 'an enemy of the people' to the likes of little Georgie 'Moonbat' at The Guardian but all three together place him quite beyond the pale!  However, I always try to judge a man by what he does rather than what he says and judging by a report at The Coffee House, Matt Ridley is a very pukka chap!  Being the son of a viscount, naturally he has a family trust (wish I had one!) which owns land some of which is rented out.  Ridley was dismayed to learn that some of this land, which earned his trust £8,500 a year, was going to be used for wind turbine machines, a scam an industry which Ridley has castigated in the past.  Unable to stop the activity, he has volunteered £8,500 as an annual prize for the best essay exposing 'Greenie' twaddle.  That's what I call putting your money where your mouth is.  Well done, sir, you're a gentleman and a scholar!

 

"Joy shall be in heaven . . .

. . . over one sinner that repenteth" and all that sort of thing.  Well, I know the quote is not a precise fit for the event but it was the one that leapt to mind when I heard the news.  According to The Telegraph a few days ago, 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins engaged in a long debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the course of which he admitted that he was not entirely, absolutely, completely, convinced that there was no God:

There was surprise when Prof Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator.

Prof Dawkins said that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of his beliefs, referencing the seven point scale of belief that he sets out in his book The God Delusion.

The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did.

It was not reported at the time but I have it on good authority that Canterbury's beard shot out horizontal to the floor, and that several members of the Humanist Society required first aid!  When challenged as to why, therefore, he did not call himself an agnostic, he replied that he did.  At this point, I am led to believe, the scene resembled a Bateman cartoon with devout atheists rocking back on their heels with eyeballs threatening to burst from their sockets!

You see, that's one the very few advantages of living long - you get to see sundry chumps change their minds.  Even if, in this case, it is only 0.1 of his mind!

 

'Peak Oil' just peaked and died!

I remember when I first discovered this 'internet-blogging-thingie' I began by just visiting other sites and joining in the commentary.  I don't know why but, despite my placid personality, most times it would end in an 'e-fight'.  One of the topics almost guaranteed to kick off trouble was when some 'Greenie' would come on, tolling his bell, so to speak, on the subject of 'Peak Oil', it's imminent arrival and our certain decline into mass starvation and destitution.  Their cures for this supposed ill varied from 'Herodical' (kill all the children - now!) to dippy-daft (we must all revert to living in rural mud-huts).  My mild suggestion that whilst the notion of 'Peak Oil' might be considered as an abstract possibility it was not worth wasting time (and energy - heh-heh!) worrying about it because it was never going to be a problem.  Cue hissy-fits, rage, insults and then, usually, a ban!

Courtesy of IHTM, I have been reading a piece by Andrew Orlowski at The A Register. (The name Orlowski rang a bell and courtesy of my superb search-thingie I discovered that I had referred to him back in January 2010 when he succeeded in giving my mate 'Rupe' a slap for some unscientific nonsense printed in The Times.)  Anyway, this time Orlowski is drawing our attention to a paper produced by Citigroup commodity analysts (PDF version here) which is entitled: 

Resurging North American Oil Production and the Death of the Peak Oil Hypothesis  

The United States’ Long March Toward Energy Independence [*]

According to Orlowski, the report states that new "unconventional" oil and gas is now available as it is extracted from shale via such means as 'fracking'.  In addition, progress has been made in the production of synthetic oils and, according to Orlowski:

in a decade the low-carbon synthetic replacements for oil will be in production, too, assuming oil remains at $40-$50 a barrel.

So now the 'Greenies' are faced with an all too real 'end-of-the-world' scenario as their own deeply cherished beliefs literally go up in smoke.  What will they think of next to scare the children?  My best guess is Global Freezing.  Stick around, it will not be long in coming!

[*]  Mind you, the thought that the USA might be self-sufficient in oil energy in the near future leaves me worrying about who will undertake to keep supplies flowing from the middle-east?

 

David Davis MP rats on the bankers and their bonuses!

Ever since I learned about Pavlov and his slavering dogs I have always been fascinated by experiments with animals designed to show human behaviour.  Mind you, I'm never very sure quite how useful or even accurate they are and David Davis MP adds to my doubts with an intriguing post at The Coffee House.

He quotes from a book which I have never read by Dan Ariely called The Upside of Irrationality.  Apparently, Mr. Ariely has studied some animal experiments, rats, to be precise, carried out a century ago which indicate that, paradoxically, the bigger the bonus, or 'incentive', the worse the outcome!

He cites a century-old experiment in which rats were placed in a cage with two pathways. One led to a reward, the other to a device which gave the rats an electric shock. The aim of the experiment was to see how quickly the rats learned which path to take.

As an added twist, the scientists varied the size of the electric shock. Some rats who took the wrong pathway received a low level shock, which produced a tickling sensation. Others received a medium shock, while a third group received a high level shock, which was almost fatal.

The results seem eminently predictable.  The higher the electric shock received, the greater the motivation there is for the rat to learn the rules of the cage, and therefore those rats who receive the strongest shock are the quickest to learn which pathway to take out of the cage.  It is obvious.
But wrong.

The rats which received the biggest shock — in effect the most severe punishment for making a poor decision — were slower to figure out which pathway was right than all the other rats. In other words, the group with the biggest incentive to succeed were the least successful. 

Heh!  But that's rats, you might mutter, what about us intelligent humans?  Oh dear:

In a different experiment, this time conducted in India, Ariely offered volunteers bonuses for winning games which tested their reasoning skills and cognitive ability. The volunteers were divided into three groups. For the first group, the bonus on offer was equivalent to a day’s pay for the average local worker. Winners in the second group received a bonus worth two weeks’ pay, and in the third group, 5 months’ pay.

The results would make bankers quiver.

You would expect those with the most to gain to be the most motivated and perform best. In fact, those in line for the biggest bonus performed more slowly and less successfully than those chasing more modest windfalls.

Instinctively we think large monetary incentives must encourage individuals to go the extra mile. But Ariely draws our attention to the psychology of bonuses and the dangers huge rewards can create. The frantic pursuit of riches can heighten feelings of workplace stress and encourage recklessness and poor decision making.

Unsurprisingly the banks don’t want to hear this.

Well, I can't say I blame them, I mean who wants to be compared to a bunch of rats? Oh, you mean they already are!  Well that may be because the rest of us have at last cottened on to the fact that 'banker rats' collect their rewards irrespective of any outcome at the business they are supposed to serve.

 

Good grief! Good news!

This is going to make all the doomsters even more miserable!  David Middleton over at WUWT brings "glad tidings of great joy".  I will not attempt to paraphrase his wonderful essay because, apart from anything else, I have been told by 'she who must be obeyed' in terms which brook no argument that this garret I occupy along with my computer and my books has got to be tidied and cleaned - or else!  However, I will leave you with a couple of quotes by way of a taster and then you can pop over and be made cheerful:

The world has plenty of food, water, space, mineral resources and the Earth’s environment is generally cleaner now than it was 35 years ago. Crop yields have continued to maintain an increasing upward trend for 40 years… And there is every reason to believe that crop yields will continue to improve (unless we really are on the verge of returning to Little Ice Age climate conditions).  [...]

The only thing the world has a genuine shortage of is honest and competent people in gov’t. Almost all of our problems are due to political interference with market forces.

Can't argue with that last one!

 

Alan Turing: crushed by conformity

I have mentioned before the fact that that very nice old man, 'Rupe', sent me a devilish clever 'magi-recording-playback-thingie' which has only taken me several months to master.  Needless to say, having mastered it and recorded numerous items on it I hardly ever watch any of them!  It must drive poor rich old 'Rupe' potty.  However, today, having been robbed of watching an exciting 'footie' match between the two Manchester teams (and hoping thereby to see a full scale inter-Manchester riot to follow) because the ref sent off one of the players in the first ten minutes - pillock! - I decided to try and watch one of the programmes I had recorded.  I chose a 'dramatised documentary' by Channel4 on the life and early death of Alan Turing.  It is an irony of the gloomiest sort that the technology behind 'Rupe's 'magi-thingie' could be traced back, in whole or part, to the genius of Alan Turing, himself.

With countries as with people there are 'different strokes for different folks'.  Thus, in most countries of the world, if you step out of line they shoot you.  Here, in this "scepter'd Isle", we 'conform' you out of existence, and at no time did we do it better than the 1950s.  Honesty impels me to confess that, personally, looking back to the '50s and my teenage years, I think of it as almost a lost golden age of safety and security.  But then, I wasn't an outsider.  I was a conformist.  Turing's tale, which is too well known for me to retell here, shows what happened if you failed to conform.  No need for the lead-filled cosh, water-boarding, Gulags or any of that, just steady, constant, unrelenting pressure by the authorities - who never failed to call you 'Sir' - until you fell back into line.  This is what Turing suffered.  They crushed the spirit and then the genius and finally the life out of arguably the greatest British genius of the 20th century.

The film kept repeating that Turing was the man who did more than any other to win the war.  Nonsense, of course, there were others equally deserving of that sort of praise, but he was certainly up there with them.  Nor, to be accurate, can the surreptitious pressures of the security services be entirely blamed.  By any standards, unless you knew the man intimately, Turing was a walking, talking security risk, not just because of his homosexuality but more because of his other-worldly innocence.  Alas, government bureaucracies, especiallyif they have the word 'Intelligence' in their title are often short of that very ingredient.

However, none of that excuses the lack of proper action by contemporary governments.  As far as I know there are only two 'memorials' to this English genius.  The first is the 'Alan Turing Way', a ghastly dual-carriageway on the outskirts of Manchester where he worked at the University.  The second, set up by private funds, is a statue in a Manchester park set, appropriately, between the Univerity and a 'Gay Village'.   In my view it really is time that the nation, through the government, set up a suitable memorial in central London to his lasting memory.

 

Is there anybody there? asks 'the Kraut'

But first, a terrific poem which came back to me through the ages from my long-lost school days provoked by the recent words of 'the Kraut':

'IS there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,	5
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill	10
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight	15
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.	20
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even	25
Louder, and lifted his head:—
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake	30
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,	35
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

I love that poem - how could I have forgotten it for so long? Anyway, on to 'the Kraut' who had some fascinating ruminations in The WaPo last week.  He asks one of those simple but deadly questions, "Are we alone in the universe?"  He was prompted to this by the, probably undue, excitement in cosmological circles (or should that be 'ellipses?) at the discovery of some planet-like objects circling suns in much the same way as our tired, battered, old planet does.  Instantly this raises the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.  "Is there anybody there?" we mutter, and answer comes there none!

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

The silence, as they say, is deafening!  And perplexing.

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

'The Kraut' quotes something called The Drake Equation (1961) which seeks to enumerate how many advanced civilisations there must be in just our galaxy alone.  Apparently if you add in the information gained from modern satellite sources the number should be very great indeed.  And yet ... and yet ... despite all our signals sent out at the speed of light and our monitoring devices which could pick up the sound of an alien's fart from a zillion miles away - there is nothing, just the vast, endless emptiness of nothing.

Personally, I am not too unhappy because I always reckon that people - or beings, if you like - are nearly always trouble in the end and are therefore best avoided!  But 'the Kraut', being 'the Kraut', has an even gloomier explanation:

Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

He lists the many man-made possibilities available to those madmen who, seeking a salvation in an after-world, would be happy to pull the trigger and bring about 'apocalypse now'.  But then, in a startling and original piece of thinking, he points to the only thing likely to save us - politics!

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Good man, 'the Kraut', he makes you think.

 

Misbehavin' models and the stern Austrian!

I have been meaning for some time to draw your attention to an excellent post (and interesting comments thread) emanating from Cafe Hayek and it's proprietor, Don Boudreaux.  In it, he quotes a passage from Friedrich Hayek's acceptance speech on being presented with the Nobel Prize for Economics.  In it, Hayek drew attention to the dangers when what I call 'technologists' attempt to use the tools of real scientists working in the fields of physics and chemistry and apply them to human activities, in this case, economics.  He warns especially of the use, or misuse, of mathematical modeling, beloved of so many macro-economists whose prognostications have proved so wrong, so often.  However, I would stretch Hayek's warning further to include the 'technologists' attempting to forecast global climate by means of mathematical models which so far have proven to be almost totally useless.  So, in this extract I have added to Hayek's reference to "economists" the words "global climate technologists":

"It seems to me that this failure of the economists [global climate technologists] to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error.  It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, ‘is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed’”

Hmmn!  "Scientistic", ugly word but then it sums up an ugly attitude.

 

The swots begin to realise they are dumb and dumber!

Actually, my title is not only unkind but also a tad misleading if it leaves you with the impression that I am somehow anti-science and scientists.  I am frequently anti-technologists, particularly when they manifest themselves in quasi-scientific speculations like global climate and neo-Darwinism; but I have genuine, almost open-mouthed admiration for real scientists, particularly those grappling with the mysteries on the far horizons of our knowledge.  Some of them, like the late Richard Feynman, are almost heroes in my imagination. 

Even so, regular readers will already know of my firm belief in disbelief, otherwise known as agnosticism, and my shivering delight in rich examples of irony.  Reading a recent article in Harper's Magazine by Alan P. Lightman, I was able to hug myself with delight at receiving a double helping of both!  Lightman, a considerable polymath, himself, reminds us of the incredible achievements of physicists during the 20th century.  I suppose it began in 1900 with Max Planck and his almost accidental discovery of the peculiar behaviour of electrons.  From that moment on it was the scientific equivalent of Renaissance travellers discovering America - a huge undiscovered continent filled with delights, riches and dangers.  In they rushed, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman and many, many more.  At last, was the general feeling, we've almost cracked it, soon, very soon, there will be no more mysteries! 

“Back in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Alan Guth, “the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out.” What physicists had figured out were very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together, the weak force that is responsible for some forms of radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles. And there were prospects for merging the theory known as quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and thus pulling all of them into the fold of what physicists called the Theory of Everything, or the Final Theory.

It just needed one more shove, but unfortunately, it was like shoving on the end of a piece of string.  Indeed, in their efforts to reach this final Theory of Everything they had to use what they called 'string theory', the implications of which are mind-bending.

In essence (and you need to read Lightman's essay to double-check my errors of omission and/or commission), they discovered that for life to exist at all, as it manifestly does on this planet, several critical criteria at the moment of the 'Big Bang' had to be within very tight and specific limits.  Too much, or too little, of this, or of that, and life would not have been able to develop.  And yet it did!  Looking back at this peculiar, one almost might say, contrived, state of affairs at the very beginning of the universe, there is a severe temptation to suggest that God is a sort of master chef adding a pinch of this, or slightly less of that, in order to ensure the flavour of the stew is just right!  In other words, the sheer exactness of conditions at the very instant of the 'Big Bang' might lead a physicist to mutter, sotto voce, if he has his eye on a Nobel prize, the dread words - Intelligent Design!

Recoiling in horror, the swots have been forced into ever more complex hypotheses to explain away this awkward set of circumstances.  One theory currently in vogue in some quarters is the idea of  a 'multiverse', that is, the notion of an almost infinite number of universes all of which are different.  Thus, we can all relax and forget about the amazing set of circs which has allowed life to exist in this universe because given a 'multiverse' of almost infinite proportions it was bound to happen somewhere, sometime.  I have to say that smacks of desperation, to me.  H0wever, I leave it to you to read Mr. Lightman's fascinating article and make up your own minds.  In the meantime, I will, after shifting my buttocks to obtain what comfort I can, remain sitting firmly on this fence.

 

"Bums on seats" - no, darling, not theatre - university!

I confess that reading Richard North first thing every morning is a bit like taking a cold shower.  His acerbic style is certainly invigorating but what I can only call his galloping distemper is sometimes  a tad tiring.  Even so, it is difficult to disagree with many of the points he raises and his single-minded pursuit of various bees in his bonnet is wholly admirable.  Today he has a post on the commercialisation of universities.

I hesitate to write on the subject of universities not least because I never went to one, although regular readers will know that ignorance of a subject is not always - alright,then, never - a bar to my commentary!  Without quite knowing why, I always thought is was a mistake to do away with the old Polytechnics which, by and large, taught technology and trades and by so doing met the requirements of a large market place of young people who were practical rather than academic.  However, a combination of silly socialism combined with inverted snobbery from Polytechnic staffs who aspired to the chimera of University status put an end to what had been an excellent system.  As always, the truth of that old saying, 'more means less', was proven yet again.  Now, it seems, every piddling market town has its own 'University' and as sure as eggs is eggs their produce is pathetic.  So-called degrees in Flower Arranging and Plasticine Modeling do not seem far-fetched, but what is worse is that degrees in traditionally 'hard' subjects are becoming easier and easier to achieve.

According to Richard North:

Some years ago, I experienced this personally when I helped out my PhD supervisor, doing the preliminary marking for first year honours degree dissertations. Applying basic rules of literacy and logic as my measure, I "failed" more than 60 percent of the papers.

Very much in accordance with the above, my supervisor reinstated all of them. The motivation was entirely economic. Keeping a course running is entirely about "bums on seats" and failures make the courses economically unsustainable.

Nowadays, the emphasis is not on academic excellence but in keeping up the numbers of fee-paying students in order to meet the overheads of actually running a working University.  My guess is that these overheads have been needlessly inflated by all those former Polytechnic lecturers gradually promoting themselves to professors with pay and perks to match!  Happily, the new system of hugely increased fees will concentrate parental minds enormously and dear little Fergus and Harriet  might have to go out and earn a crust instead of shagging for Britain at Cleethorpe's University!

Where all this will leave the country in its efforts to produce and encourage truly first-rate minds I have no idea.  I would be happy to see my taxes used to provide scholorships to poorer students provided they can pass a truly testing examination in one of the traditionally rigorous scientific subjects.  We need our best brains to be tested and trained for the benefit of all of us.  In the meantime, I look forward to more and more 'Polyversities'  going broke.

 

No need to sing 'Tootle-oo to Tuvalu'

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you  - Nils-Axel Mörner!  Alright, alright, I 'd never heard of him either until 'Dellers' tipped me off but now this cheerful Dane, so unlike his gloomy but more famous predecessor, has written an article for The Spectator (no link yet but I'm sure there will be one eventually so keep trying, or better still, rush out and buy a copy!)  So what is the good news brought to us by this fearfully brainy, Danish scientist?  Well, Canute was right after all!  I had better explain.

First of all, for those who place great value on such things (which includes every HAF there ever was), Mörner is, according to Wiki:

the former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University.  He was president of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) Commission on Neotectonics (1981–1989).

Also, and more to the point today:

He's also been the Chairman of INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution.

However, the really important thing about Mörner is that he doesn't just sit around in the UEA with the likes Phil Jones playing around with computer models.  Instead he, Shlock-Horror, actually goes out and measures things - things like global sea levels.  Thus he writes:

At Tuvalu in the Pacific, I found no evidence of flooding - despite claims in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth that it was one of those "low-lying Pacific nations" whose residents have had to "evacuate their homes because of rising seas".  In fact the tide gauge of the past 25 years clearly shows there has been no rise.

Gotta love this guy!  But proving that Al Gore is the lying liar's lying liar of first choice is relatively easy, but Mörner makes a much graver accusation:

The IPCC's Fourth Assessment claimed that "there is strong evidence" of sea-level rising over the last few decades.  It goes so far as to claim: "Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data  with nearly global coverage.  This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at the rate of 3mm yr-1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century.  Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates rates have occurred in some earlier decades".

Crikey!  I admitted the other day that I had no idea what a 'jib' was but perhaps I had better start learning - fast!  But no, Mörner saves the day:

Almost every word of this is untrue.  Satellite altimetry [no, me neither, but it's obviously the dog's bollocks!] is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface.  But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.

In 2003 the satellite altimetryrecord was tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year.  When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: "We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend". (My added emphasis)

Fiendishly clever, these HAFs, in one area they try like mad to hide the trend and in another they boost it up.  If any of them promised you it would be a sunny day today, would you take a brolly?

 

Willis Eschenbach calls Dr. Phil Jones "a liar": now it begins!

Pheeew!  I have just read a long and damning indictment of Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia (UEA) written with great lucidity by Willis Eschenbach at WUWT.  In it, he accuses Jones, several times, of being a liar, not a metaphorical liar, but the real thing, an out-and-out, deliberate teller of untruths.  I am conscious of stepping into a legal minefield here so I reproduce one of the less inflammatory passages to give you the flavour:

You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established. The unfortunate reality was that you simply couldn’t do what I asked.

Jones and/or the UEA are faced with a deadly decision - to sue or not to sue.  Failure to do so will leave the accusation standing in the public record.  I urge you to read Eschenbach's letter and judge his side of the story.  Now it gets 'down and dirty'!

 

I try to cheer them up but do I get a thank you . . . ?

I have been exasperating the excitable kiddies over at Deltoid.  This is an 'Ultra-Warming' site and needs to be approached with care!  They are in a fair old strop over 'Climategate II' and despite my efforts to be, er, helpful they show no gratitude.  If you have nothing else to do you can start at Comment #90 in which I reply to an earlier comment.  You can then jump to Comment #102 in which Jeff, a true believer, takes me to task.  I reprint my reply to him below because it sums up, in rather blunt terms, much of my re-action to 'Greenery' in all its forms.  I should point out that in the original, somehow Jeff's name mutated to Jeremy, another contributer to Deltoid, but I have corrected it here.  Also to aid your understanding, my first paragraph refers to the not too surprising story that two years ago the 'scientific experts' all agreed that the Canadian caribou had disappeared and, natch!, it was all the fault of Man/global warming/oil exploration or whatever.  None of these experts bothered to ask the local natives who would have told them that the caribou always went off to some other place at certain times.  Anyway, lo and behold, they're back and hopefully Sarah Palin will have plenty of targets if any of them are foolish enough to wander into Alaska.

Well done, Jeff, exasperated, of course, but sticking to the point, by and large. I'm just a little hurt that you failed to thank me for the good news on the missing mooses, or caribous, or whatever you call those great hairy things that have the temerity to shit all over Canada. They're safe and sound!

As to your first main paragraph, are you telling me that my description of bird species as waxing and waning and then, perhaps, waxing again is not an accurate description of their history? And are you also denying that there is some controversy over the fact that those giant windmills are damaging birds?

Also, let me assure you that we have no disagreement that climate change has an effect on different species of both animal and plant life. That, in fact, is the entire history of this planet - it was ever thus. Also, I did not suggest that the "dustbowl" [of the '30s] was the same as the conditions current in Texas, my point was that if it isn't 'one damn thing' it's another! By and large, central areas of big land masses suffer big weather and geological effects. Again, it was ever thus.

Finally, and at this point I must urge you to sit down with a large scotch to hand, let me spell something else out to you. You are quite correct to maintain that human activity has had an effect on living things. Some of it has been deleterious and at this point you can reel off the names of several cuddly animals to weep over but let me tell you bluntly that I, personally, couldn't give a stuff! Even worse, I don't give a stuff about polar bears! What I do see is that through human efforts more and more humans are living longer and longer because they are healthier and healthier. And, this will come as a bit of shock to you, Jeff, I actually think people are far more important than, say Natterjack Toads, or, some flower that lives in a desert and comes up once every ten years. I cannot stress this too much, people are more important than anything else! (How are you feeling? Have a sip of scotch, it'll help.)

Don't misunderstand, I don't wish other living things to be destroyed; if there are sensible ways to preserve them (which increasingly there are) then by all means do it. But, if it comes down to a straight choice then polar bears don't even get a look in!

Now you may suggest that such wanton behaviour will lead to the destruction of people as well. I would suggest that you are wrong. Because as well as causing harm, people also do good. Just two silly/simple examples, dogs and cats thrive because of Man. New types of crops, some bio-engineered, are now feeding more and more people. I could go on but you take my point.

So, I hope that positive ending has cheered you up, Jeff, because I do think you are a tad too dismal - no, no, don't thank me!

Our impartial BBC? You're having a laugh!

Here's a corker I came across on Climate Audit but which first appeared in the comments somewhere on Bishop Hill's site:

4894 is interesting. From Alex Kirby at the BBC to Phil Jones if I have read it correctly, in the run up to COP-10 [the Copenhagen conference] in 2004:

-

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies [er, that's you!] for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats. (My emphasis)

Do bear that one in mind when next you receive your demand for TV licence money!

Gradually this monstrously huge release of e-mails is being trawled through by the blog-hounds and more and more embarrassing - well, they would be embarrasing to most people if not the likes of the insufferably smug Alex Kirby - gaffes and admissions are coming to light.  And remember, the scamp who nicked them is still holding back several thousand more!  Give him a knighthood!

 

Peer review: choose your own reviewer!

A constant refrain from the HAFs, particularly the technicians (I refuse from now on to refer to them as 'scientists'), is that any criticisms or propositions from blogs can be dismissed because they have not been 'peer reviewed'.  This imprimatur, in which at least two other scientists/technicians must first study and then act as referees to either approve or not any paper offered for publication to a science magazine, is considered to be absolutely essential.  The fact that if you print a paper on the internet everyone and his brainy uncle can criticise it, is neither here nor there.  The gold standard remains the peer review system.  So just how 'golden' is it?  This, from an exchange of e-mails between an editor of a scientific magazine and 'Jones the Techie':

Glenn McGregor Chief Editor of the International Journal of Climatology and Phil Jones paper

1524.txt

Referee 1
“…I recommend to reject this manuscript, it is well below the standard acceptable in IJC or any other refereed journals. The manuscript did not contribute to the area of research, and the methodology used for comparison is naiveEand unaccepted in scientific publications…”

McGregor
“…In view of the comments of the referee(s) your manuscript has been denied publication in the International Journal of Climatology….”

Jones
“…I’m afraid these two reviews will definitely discourage me from submitting more papers to IJC! The two reviewers have not realized the novelty of this paper…You can ignore this email if you want. I won’t be submitting this paper to IJC again…”

2288.txt

McGregor
“…As I am not able to read every paper in detail I have to resort to taking a decision based on the reviews. In this case both were rather negative, hence my decision. Based on your response what I would like to do, with your permission, is to send the paper to a 3rd reviewer and request an opinion within 3 weeks…”

Jones
“…Can I make one suggestion? Good if the reviewer were a Brit – then they’s know something about the context. Possibilities would be Rob Wilby and Nigel Arnell…”  [My emphasis]

McGregor
“…Phil Thanks for the useful suggestion…”

2452.txt

McGregor:
“…I managed to get a third reviewer to look at the comments on your WG paper. Have pasted these below. I will rescind the decision of “reject” and change it to major revisions. Hope you are satisfied with this…”

“3rd Reviewer’s Comments
“…I think both of these reviews are very reasonable and not overly harsh, especially the lengthy and measured remarks from Reviewer 2. My major criticisms have all been noted by one or both of the reviewers:…”

I think the moral of the story is simple: if at first you don't succeed, choose another referee.  Honestly, would you buy a second-hand car from any of these wretches?  And remember, as a result of their scare stories, the Lesbian-straightener is going to whack another £280 a year on your energy bills in order to give handouts to windmill-makers which don't work when the wind is too high or too low which is most of the time.  Have a nice day!

I am grateful to commenter 'Intersting Times' at Climate Audit:

ADDITIONAL:  And here, from the same source as above, is yet another cosy exchange between a member of the editorial board of The International Journal of Crapulata Climatology(IJC) and a co-author with 'Jones the Techie' of a 'paper' which is actually a critique of another paper due for publication.  See how they 'fix' the problem! 

4235:
Osborne to Santer and Jones:
“…I’m on the editorial board of IJC. Phil is right that it can be rather slow (though faster than certain other climate journals!). Nevertheless, IJC really is the preferred place to publish (though a downside is that Douglass et al. may have the opportunity to have a response considered to accompany any comment).
I just contacted the editor, Glenn McGregor, to see what he can do. He promises to do everything he can to achieve a quick turn-around time (he didn’t quantify this) and he will also “ask (the publishers) for priority in terms of getting the paper online asap after the authors have received proofs”. He genuinely seems keen to correct the scientific record as quickly as possible. He also said (and please treat this in confidence, which is why I emailed to you and Phil only) that he may be able to hold back the hardcopy (i.e. the print/paper version) appearance of Douglass et al., possibly so that any accepted Santer et al. comment could appear alongside it. Presumably depends on speed of the review process…”

0455
Santer:
“…The editor of IJoC, Glenn McGregor, has agreed to treat our paper as an independent submission rather than as a comment on Douglass et al. This avoids the situation that I was afraid of – that our paper would be viewed as a comment, and Douglass et al. would have the “last word” in this exchange…”

What an absolute shower they are!  And if you don't believe anything you see in the papers, then certainly don't believe anything in a 'techie' magazine.

 

John L. Daly is not forgotten

John Lawrence Daly was a straightforward, straight-speaking Aussie whose clear-eyed intelligence saw through the bluff and bluster of the HAFs and their manic forecasts that the end of the world is nigh.  His premature death in 2004 silenced a much-needed and persistent voice expressing commonsense.  There can be no better example than this e-mail brought to light by 'Climategate II', the second release of a huge number of pirated e-mails from East Anglia University.

For those not familiar with this old battlefield, one of the problems facing the HAFs was their inability to know for sure what global temperatures were prior to the 19th century when measurements began.  Of particular concern to them were the indications of two historical periods, the Medievil Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA), which if confirmed would break Michael Mann's (in)famous 'Hockey Stick' graph which had become the global icon of the HAF religion:

As you can see, this 'reconstruction' of ancient temperatures shows them as virtually flat up until naughty Mankind got the furnaces blowing, so to speak, in the industrial era, at which point Anthropological Global Warming (AGW) began.  This iconic graph forever associated with Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University became the badge, the 'regimental colours, if you like, of the entire Global Warming movement.  The entire construction depended on the use of physical proxies, that is, ancient but still existing items such as ice cores and corals.  However, the proxie of prime importance in confirming Mann's hypothesis was tree rings whose pattern is altered by alteration in temperature.  By taking cores from very old trees we would be able to look back in time and see the temperature fluctuations, if any.

Sounds good when you first think of it but, as John Daly demonstrated, it only takes a second or third thought to realise the proposition is bollocks!  Here, in plain language in an e-mail from February 2001 he explains why:

Take this from first principles.

A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or even hemispheric.

The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other. sunlight – if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of course.

cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.

pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis

access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.

moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.

snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature – finally!

The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables.

In my article on Greening Earth Society on the Hockey Stick, I point to other evidence which contradicts Mann’s theory. The Idso’s have produced more of that evidence, and a new article on Greening Earth has `unearthed’ even more.

Mann’s theory simply does not stack up. But that was not the key issue. Anyone can put up a dud theory from time to time. What is at issue is the uncritical zeal with which the industry siezed on the theory before its scientific value had been properly tested. In one go, they tossed aside dozens of studies which confirmed the existence of the MWE [Medievil Warm Era] and LIA [Little Ice Age] as global events, and all on the basis of tree rings – a proxy which has all the deficiencies I have stated above.

The worst thing I can say about any paper such as his is that it is `bad science’. Legal restraint prevents me going further. But in his case, only those restraints prevent me going *much* further.

Cheers

John Daly

I should add that it was this controversy over tree rings which became one of the main attack platforms for Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit as he persisted with his forensic examination of the 'evidence' and the conclusions drawn by the HAFs in regard to tree ring cores.

John Daly was your archetypal, intelligent outsider.  He thought, and then he wrote, and he wrote with great clarity - I miss him!

 My thanks to Anthony Watts and Rick Werne of WUWT.

 

The scientific method at work, or, in the end truth will out

It has always been a source of quiet amusement to me the way in which the 'Warmers' cling to their notion of scientific consensus like a comfort blanket.  The fact that so many climate 'scientists' themselves brandish it as a final argument in favour of their theories serves to show their ignorance of both scientific history and scientific method.  Today I stumbled across a marvellous example of both history and method at work over at Anthony Watts's site, here it is in all its glory:

Not very attractive, I know, but it is the rib of some huge, hairy monster, a mastadon, I believe it's called, who lived some 13,800 years ago.  Actually, it didn't live for too long because that spike sticking into it is the remains of a weapon of some sort, a spear, perhaps.  The point is that in 1977 it was found in the USA entirely by accident by a young archeologist called Carl Gustafson.  He examined it closely and dated it as some 13,800 years old - at which point the scientific consensus fell on him from a great height.  You see, the consensus had all agreed decades before that the first humans into America, the Clovis people, had crossed over the land bridge that existed 13,000 years ago so it was quite impossible that hunting humans had reached America before then.  Young Gustafson was well and truly s(h)at upon!

He stuck to his guns and now, at the ripe age of 75, he has been vindicated because scientists using the very latest dating techniques have verified his findings.  Exit, scientific consensus, red in face, looking for some other mugs to believe in it - oooh, goody, here are some AGW fanatics!

Irrespective of my knockabout nonsense it is a fascinating story in its own right, worth reading.

 

Watch out next April - academic warfare is likely to break out!

I have, and enjoy, the occasional equivalent of a Saturday night punch-up over at the 'Trot-lot' and 'Warmer' sites but they are nothing compared to the unrestricted warfare that breaks out when academics fall out.  And a fall out of almost nuclear proportions can definitely be expected next April when the eminent biologist, E. O. Wilson, publishes his next book. Wilson, as some of you may know, was the 'father of sociobiology' which sought to explain evolution in terms of group behavior - Wilson was an expert on ants and their highly specialised and successful social model - whilst agreeing that the unit of evolution was the gene.

However, as I explained in a post last June, Wilson is no respecter of persons and reputations, particularly if the person and reputation concerned is 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins!  Thus, in his forthcoming book, which follows a highly technical paper written for Nature in concert with two big-brained maths swots, he intends to press home his view that altruism, such a thorn in the side of Dawkins, is not confined to kin selection but arises from group selection.  Well, I could have told him that but who the hell listens to me?

Anyway, watch out next April for a mammoth, academic hissy-fit and a  barrage of deliciously vicious book reviews in which old scores might be settled but new ones will spring up to take their place.  Such fun!

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/e-o-wilson-rsquo-s-theory-of-everything/8686/?single_page=true

 

'Krugmania': we all suffer with it to a greater or lesser extent

Two fascinating essays over at the Cafe Hayek by Russ Roberts, in order, here and here.  Economic buffs can skip the rest of this paragraph but for the benefit of those who happily avoid economics on the sensible basis that not only is it the "dismal science" but also the incomprehensible science, let me tell you that Paul Krugman is a distinguished economist and Nobel prize winner who writes for the NYT, and that Mr. Roberts is a terrific economics swot at various universities who also writes for the MSM.  I should also add the critical information that Mr. Krugman is a Keynesian who believes that governments hold the key to all macro-economic problems.  (Just to confuse matters, well this is economics, there are those who would maintain that Keynes's views were rather more nuanced than that.)  On the other hand, Mr. Roberts is an 'Austrian' - no, no, not by nationality, he is a follower of the 'Austrian school' of economic philosophy which is exemplified in the works of Friedrich Hayek and which can be (very) roughly summed up as 'almost everything a government does in the economic field is "A Bad Thing"', to use the old Sellars & Yeatman phrase. Thus, you can see that Messrs. Roberts and Krugman approach our current economic woes from directly opposite directions.  Well, it was ever thus in economics!

However, Mr. Roberts's two articles have a very much wider scope than just mere economics.  In them he suggests that the differences between himself and Mr. Krugman are ideological, that is, that they stem not so much from a strictly analytical and scientific basis but from their differing 'worldviews'.  He doesn't say this but I will, economics is like a number of other subjects which pretend to be scientific but are really only what I call 'semi-science'.  In other words, the conclusions you come to depend to a great extent on where you started from.  As Mr. Roberts puts it:

But the key point I was trying to make when invoking ideology, is that Krugman and I and most economists have a worldview. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not an indictment or a criticism. It’s simply true. That worldview may be based on casual observation, various principles that make sense to us about how the world works, facts of various kinds, and more statistically sophisticated forms of evidence.

That, I believe, is absolutely spot on and can be applied to any number of other 'semi-sciences' such as global warming, Darwinism and so forth.  Mr. Roberts goes on:

We come to these views in various ways. They are part of our experience, our upbringing, our education, our thinking, and our observations of the world around us. They are inevitably philosophical and ideological at least in part and often in whole. We use these worldviews to filter and understand new information and process that information accordingly. That is not the way most economists or social scientists or even plain scientists think of themselves. They think of themselves as truth-seekers. (Journalists, by the way, have a very similar disconnect between how they view themselves and how I suspect they actually behave.) Truth-seekers look at the facts, allegedly uninfluenced by prior biases, philosophies, theories, and ideologies.

My emphasis above, and examples of what Roberts says can be seen on any of the global warming sites.  He continues:

My claim is that this image of ourselves as pure truth-seekers is a fantasy. Facts don’t speak for themselves. We have to have some kind of worldview to interpret the facts, to filter them, to process them, to organize them. We all suffer from confirmation bias. Facts that challenge our worldview tend to be ignored, minimized, or dismissed as irrelevant.

Ouch!  That certainly applies to me.  It also, I think, applies outside of 'semi-science' even, or especially, into the world of politics.  I have remarked before, in considering the various candidates for the Republican nomination, that so-called intellectual knowledge, or experience in high government office, is not the criteria by which they should be judged.  It is their underlying 'worldview' which is critical, all else flows from that.  We have, according to the (dim) lights of MSM commentary a university-educated intellectual in the White House today and bar a small minority he is generally reckoned to be an outstanding failure as a president.  The reason, in my opinion, is obvious, his entire 'worldview' is skewed in the wrong direction, and therefore, as sure as night follows day, his actions will prove to be disasterous.  It is also why I instinctively draw towards the likes of Sarah Palin and Herman Cain, because their 'worldview' is, in my opinion, clear-eyed and, on the whole, accurate and on that fairly firm base of relative reality they can be trusted to operate and re-act to 'unknown unknowns' in a sensible manner.  Mitt Romney (and also I suspect Rick Perry), of course, has no 'worldview' beyond getting his arse into the Oval Office armchair.  That is not to disqualify him from the job but one cannot do other than harbour considerable doubts.

I urge you all to read Mr. Roberts's two articles and then apply them to a wider 'worldview'!

 

Contrarian or crank?

Looking at his photo you would find it hard to choose, he could be either.  However, given that he takes to wearing a red fedora you might think he was a comedian!

Raymond Tallis by Felix Clay, Eyevine

Actually, I think 'contrarian' is his best description given that he is a former clinical neuroscientist by the name of Raymond Tallis and that he spends most of his time at war with his fellow neuroscientists.  I am obliged to The Chronicle of Higher Education - and, no, don't ask what an ignoramus like me is doing in such high-falutin' company - for an interesting article on the man by Mr. Marc Parry in which he suggests that perhaps a better job description for Dr. Tallis is 'dustman' on the grounds that he describes most of the theories put forward by his fellow specialists as "neuro trash" which he is all too eager to deposit on the nearest dump!

Happily, on this occasion, given that I know nothing of the subject I do not have to offer an opinion (wadd'ya mean that never stopped me before?!) I can simply carry their coats whilst they set to.  On the one side we have, according to Mr. Parry, those who support:

[...] a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love.

In the other corner we have the redoubtable, and probably very irritating, Dr. Tallis, who:

In 2006, Tallis gave up hospital-ward rounds for a full-time writing life that unfolds in morning and afternoon rounds of two local pubs. In these "offices," the atheist-humanist nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals "acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces." He takes aim at their exaggerated claims in a new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (McGill-Queen's University Press).

I like his working routine, it reminds me of the old three-martini lunches so beloved and missed of yesteryear.  I think I would pay good money to attend one of his lectures:

In a cheerful voice, turned out in a magenta tie and a blue boating blazer with broad white stripes, Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.

As I confessed above, I have no knowledge of the arcane details of neuroscience but I instinctively side with Dr. Tallis, not, I hasten to add, for religious reasons but simply because I am by nature a 'Bolshie bugger' and I do not care for the notion that anyone tells me what to do - whether it's God or Darwin!

It's a good article well worth reading not least because it makes you wish you knew more.

 

OK, enough of the science, already, my head hurts!

Honestly, Doctor, everywhere I go these days I am pursued by science and it's not fair because I gave all that up when I was sixteen and failed my exams!  But it won't leave me alone; if it isn't neutrinos whizzing past me faster than the speed of light then its news that the universe is expanding at an even faster rate than first thought. It's giving me a headache and on top of that I'm back into all that wave/particle duality stuff, and really, Doctor, I don't care, I mean, I'm not prejudiced, if these, er, thingies want to swing both sides of the street, it's OK with me.  What goes on in the privacy of a scientific laboratory is their business not mine provided they don't frighten the horses!

Alright, I'll calm down and try and explain.  As I indicated a few posts back I have returned to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a superb primer for science dummies attempting (Health Warning: Do Not Try This Alone!) to grapple with the craziness of quantum mechanics.  I have reached the dreaded 'two slit experiment' which, I recall from 30 years ago, blew my mind then and has done so again today.  Being a lifetime party-pooper, I will attempt to summarise it for anyone who has enjoyed an untroubled life so far, after all,why should I suffer on my own?

Back in 1802, some science swat shone a lamp at a wall into which were cut two slits.  He measured the results that appeared on a back wall behind the slitted one.  He found that if he kept one slit shut the result, unsurprisingly, was a well-defined square of light on the 'receiving' wall.  If he opened both slits, the result was a pattern of bright, semi-bright and dark stripes because the waves of light having passed through two slits they then interfered with each other on the far side, either re-inforcing each other, or cancelling each other out, or half and half, depending on their state when they collided.  Again, that's perfectly normal, the swats call it refraction and you can see it operating if you throw two pebbles into a pond and watch the ripples when they meet.

So, that was that, it had been proved without any doubt that energy (light) went about its business in waves and God was in His heaven and all was well with the world - end of story.  But this is science and there is never any end to it!  Nearly a hundred years later, in marched Herr Prof. Planck who, instead of planning WWI, had been interfering with little particles called electrons which surround the central core of an atom.  He found that if you gave them a dose of energy (say, heat) they became very, er, energetic and would glow (with light, that is, not pleasure, do behave yourselves!) but as the heat was removed and they calmed down they would give back the energy they had received in the form of light.  Very decent of them, you might think, but Planck noticed, to his personal irritation, I gather, that when they gave back their light it came in the form of specifically-sized quantities, not in continuous waves!  I assume that Planck then suffered with a headache of his own because now it looked as though light was not a wave after all but a series of quanta, or particles, a bit like a stream of bullets.  They called these light particles - photons.

So the science swats then went back to the double slit experiment.  They checked that if you switched on a light source with first one slit open, then two slits open, the results of the old experiment repeated itself.  However, if you used the latest gadgetry which allowed you to fire photons one at a time something very strange happened.  If you kept one slit shut and fired a photon through the other slit, you could mark the exact place it hit on the photon-sensitive plate at the rear.  You could do this several times and each time the photon would hit exactly the same place.  But then, without altering anything else, if you opened the second slit and pulled the trigger you would know, by comparison with the plates used in the wave defraction experiment, that the photon would hit one of the dark (non-light) areas.  However, when the plate was checked it was found that the photon had, so to speak, altered course and hit somewhere else in a bright area where it was 'allowed' to hit!  The question then arose, and with it my headache, how did the bloody photon 'know' that the second slit was open so that it could alter its trajectory? 

Answers on a postcard, please, to the Royal Society, not me because I'm off to take a paracetamol and have a lie down!  However, I can give you a clue.  Apparently, and it's obvious really (he muttered, giggling, as he played with his yo-yo), light is both a wave and a particle, all at the same time, and which is which depends entirely on how you look at it!  In other words, there is no objective reality, we make 'reality' when and how we look at things.  (Sorry, how's your head  . . . ?)

Now for some good scientific news!  You will remember -  you better or else! - that a few posts back I drew attention to the rather obvious and mundane fact that Al Gore is a lying liar.  He recently took over a TV station for a long dissertation on his fanatical beliefs concerning CO2 and global warming.  In his film there was one particular experiment that was shown in which two jars, each containing thermometers, were heated.  One jar had normal air in it, the other was filled with CO2.  The film then 'showed' the CO2 thermometer racing up like a rocket in comparison to the other.  The incomparable Anthony Watts of Watt's Up With That? put that particular film sequence through a forensic grinder and showed without doubt that huge chunks of it were 'photoshopped', or, faked, as we might call it!  However, Watts has now gone even further and, in the very finest traditions of good science, has attempted to replicate Gore's experiment.  Without, of course, any help from the programme makers he has managed to buy exactly the same kit that was used and, following their assertion that:

You can replicate this effect yourself in a simple lab experiment

that is exactly what he tried to do because, as Al Gore himself said,

The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.

The dismal, from Gore's point of view, result is summed up by Watts: 

Thus, the experiment as designed by Mr. Gore does not show the greenhouse effect as we know it in our atmosphere, it does show how heat transfer works and differences in heat transfer rates with different substances, but nothing else.

Anthony Watts closes his deconstruction of Gore's non-science thus:

Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified [my emphasis] , and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.

The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

"Falsified"!  Key word, that!  Absolutely deadly when used in a scientific context.  As soon as I read it my eyes flickered towards the various volumes of Karl Popper's work on my bookshelf but I dare not re-open any of them lest my headache turns into a migraine!  Please read Watts's piece, and if you have children, let them read it, too, because it is a perfect example of the scientific method in action.

 

Oh death WHAT is your sting-a-ling-a-ling?

Sorry for going AWOL over the last two days.  There were practical reasons ("Events" etc, etc) but rather surprisingly for an Olympic-level bore like me, I actually didn't have much to say and so for once I said nothing!

However, one of the reasons for my absence was in order to attend the funeral of an elderly neighbour who died 'naturally' in her sleep.  Ever since I have been pondering exactly what they mean by dying 'naturally'?  Of course, I understand death caused by a No. 29 bus running over you, or, a throw of the microbiological dice which results first in one cell going malignant and then spreading the malignancy throughout your system until it gives up and you die.  But if you suffer no external or internal trauma, why and how do you die?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that 'natural' death was simply a demonstration of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - well, everything gets blamed on the poor old 2nd Law!  The idea was that the body is a perfect example of a closed system which the 2nd Law demands and that from day one we strive to inject energy into it by means of food and drink.  Unfortunately, however hard we work at that we cannot outpace entropy which gradually increases until  it reaches an equilibrium, at which point there is no more energy in the system and we die.  According to the physics swats, the universe will go the same way!

Mind you, I'm not quite sure how that ties in with the latest galactic observations, reported last week, which show the speed at which the universe is expanding is actually increasing!  Everything is hurtling away from everything else faster and faster.  Where is it getting the energy from, I ask?  Perhaps its on the same stuff as some of those so-called athletes waiting to perform at next year's Olympics.  Anyway, to drop into this post with a dull thud the tritest of trite opinions, the more we learn the more we learn how little we know.  And it's funny how that old American saying, 'what goes around comes around', frequently occurs in science.  Thus, I was struck by a description of electrons circling the central nucleus of an atom.  It is as though the nucleus was surrounded by a series of invisible shells, each one larger than the next the further out they went.  The electrons sit naturally on the inner-most ring but when energy (heat) is directed at them they jump further and further to the outer rings.  However the description of these invisible shells operating at the sub-atomic level instantly reminded me of the Ptolemaic system which once ruled the scientific circus for 1,500 years or so and was considered the last, indeed the only, word on how the universe worked - until Copernicus came along and turned it all inside out.  Typical Prussian troublemaker - heh!

ADDITIONAL:  Another of those odd coincidences.  Last night listening to my radio there was a report that a group of genetecists had been given permission to map the entire genetic code of a lady who recently died at the age of 115 years!  Apparently she had offered her body for scientific research long before her death.  The scientists are attempting to find out if genetics played any part in her immensely long life.

 

Right, children, time for your Bumper Book of Amazing Facts

I used to love those sorts of books when I was a child - about 5 years ago, according to the 'Memsahib'!  Anyway, provoked by my own post on the subject of quantum theory the other day I turned to one of my absolutely favourite books which I purchased about 30 years ago.  It has the unusual title, which I admit was part of the reason I bought it, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics written by Gary Zukav. It is, without a doubt, one of the very best guides for the scientific simpleton into the mysteries of this fascinating, exciting but complex subject.  Mr. Zukav, like the very best of teachers, takes you by the hand and leads you through a jungle of high science, low technology with a good dollop of philosophy added.  I love this book!  Anyway, yesterday I took it down from the shelf and started reading it again.  Instantly I was caught up in what Lear calls "the mystery of things".  Of course, within a very few pages I was reminded of things which I had long forgotten and this passage in particular left me, as it had done 30-odd years ago, with my 'flabber' well and truly 'gasted'!  In it, Zukav provides a sense of scale so that one can appreciate the differences between this world we live in, the atomic world which lies beneath the surface and the sub-atomic world which is situated even deeper - my emphases throughout:

"The smallest object we can see, even under a microscope, contains millions of atoms.  To see the atoms in a baseball, we would have to make the baseball the size of the earth.  If a baseball was the size of the earth, its atoms would be about the size of grapes.  [...]

The step downward from the atomic level takes us to the sub-atomic level.  Here we find the particles that make up the atoms.  The difference between the atomic level and the sub-atomic level is as great as the difference between the atomic level and the world of sticks and stones.  It would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of a grape.  In fact it would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of a room.  To see the nucleus of an atom, the atom would have to be as high as a fourteen storey building!  The nucleus of an atom as high as a fourteen storey building would be about the size of a grain of salt.   Since a nuclear particle has about 2,000 times more mass than an electron, the electrons revolving around this nucleus would be about the size of dust particles.

The Dome of Saint Peter's basilica in the Vatican has a diameter of about fourteen storeys.  Imagine a grain of salt in the middle of the dome of Saint Peter's with a few dust particles revolving around at the edge of the dome.  This gives us the scale of sub-atomic particles.  It is in this realm, the sub-atomic realm, that Newtonian physics has proven inadequate, and that quantum mechanics is required to explain particle behavior."

It's only page 57 but already my mind is boggling nicely, thank you for asking!  Even so, what Max Planck, and all the others who followed him, have revealed to us is - and here I use a word that has almost lost its original meaning since it was highjacked by 'youf' - awsome!  And the myriad mysteries which follow from it are even more thrilling.  Perhaps the most amazing fact of all, which Zukav does not refer to, is that Man, little puny Man, in existence for no more than a blink of an eye in celestial terms, has yet managed to delve into these deep-laid mysteries and expose them.  Perhaps that will be our final epitaph.

 

'The Kraut' Kracks a Joke!

Some things just don't go together and the thin-lipped, stoney-faced Charles Krauthammer arm-in-arm with a joke is not something I would ever expect to see.  Don't be fooled by that faint smile, I'm dead certain it has been photo-shopped!

However, thanks to Malcolm Pollack at waka waka waka, always good for the odd gem, apparently 'The Kraut' actually told one the other day:

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

Alright, alright, not exactly a side-splitter, I admit, but not bad coming from 'The Kraut'.

Oh, do cheer up, I'm trying my best!

 

The biggest collection of brain-boggling brains ever assembled!

The 1927 Solvay conference on particle physics: back row, third from right, Werner Heisenberg, sixth from right, Erwin Schrödinger; middle row, from right, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Louis de Broglie and centre, Paul Dirac. Front row, second from left, Max Planck, next to him, Marie Curie, then Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein. Of the 29 pictured, 18 won Nobel prizes, Curie in both physics and chemistry

---

This picture and much of the basis for my post is taken from an article by Philip Ball at the Prospect site and he is definitely not to blame for my misinterpretations!

Crikey!  Even looking at that collection of mammoth 'brain-boxes' gives me a headache!  Well, what else do you expect from a man who failed Maths, Physics & Chemistry at school?  Even so, with the courage of the truly stupid I will attempt to provide you with the essence of Mr. Ball's essay which is worth reading in full - in fact it might be essential to do so because it is quite likely that I shall get hold of the wrong end of Schrödinger's cat!

Mr. Ball is taking a long view of quantum theory to see where and what it has lead to in the past 100-odd years. It all began with Max Planck who theorised that light was actually made up of tiny discrete bits of energy which he called 'photons'.  Einstein seized upon this and showed how it was that these high speed particles, or 'quanta', which knocked the electrons out of bits of metal, the process we know as the photo-electric effect.  And, as Mr. Ball usefully reminds us, it was for this paper that Einstein won his Nobel prize - not relativity.  Even so, from that time on, it was all downhill for physics, or perhaps, all upside down and inside out might be a better description.  But despite its almost 'unreal' description of 'reality', within the last 100-odd years quantum physics has solved innumerable problems and been turned to immense practical use in a variety of fields:

Scientists routinely adopt the approach memorably described by Cornell physicist David Mermin, as “shut up and calculate.” They use quantum mechanics to calculate everything from the strength of metal alloys to the shapes of molecules. Routine application of the theory underpins the miniaturisation of electronics, medical MRI imaging and the development of solar cells, to name just a few burgeoning technologies.

It is very necessary for physicists to keep 'shtum' and just stick to the maths because the whole field of quantum physics is based on paradox after paradox.  'Things' are and are not at the same time!  'Reality' is that these tiny particles might be here doing this, or over there doing that and you will not know until you 'look' at them at which point 'reality' or part of it, collapses, so it wan't very 'real' after all because merely by 'looking' you alter 'reality'!  Hence, Schrödinger's famous cat really is both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box to check, at which point one set of possibilities collapses.  I could go on but the late, and very great, Richard Feynman put it better than anyone:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.(1)

And he won a Nobel prize on the subject!  Still, that is hardly surprising given the nature of that mysterious entity we call 'light'.  In the earliest science, light was considered to be made up of particles but then later investigation showed that it was probably more like a wave.  Then along came Planck and, hey-ho, we were back to particles again.  Once more, Feynman does his best to explain it:

This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 0r 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics.  Now we know how the electrons and light behave.  But what can I call it?  If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves.  They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way.  They behave in a way that is like nothing you have ever seen before. (1)

So, today they are both waves and particles at the same time!  However, even given this weird, paradoxical description of a totally different 'reality' below the level of the everyday 'reality' which we inhabit and experience, nevertheless, quantum physics is highly accurate as Mr. Ball reminds us:

Quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable theories in science: its prediction of how light interacts with matter is accurate to the eighth decimal place.

So that's alright, then!  Even so, the description of 'reality' offered by quantum physics, that nothing at the sub-atomic level is ever certain, only the odds on various outcomes are accurate, was hardly satisfactory:

But the question of how to interpret the theory—what it tells us about the physical universe—was never resolved by founders such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Famously, Einstein himself was unhappy about how quantum theory leaves so much to chance: it pronounces only on the relative probabilities of how the world is arranged, not on how things fundamentally are. (My emphasis)

Back in the '20s, Neils Bohr and his 'disciple', Werner Heisenberg, attempted to come to terms with the paradoxical nature of the science they were investigating and proclaimed the Copenhagen Interpretation.  As Mr. Ball explains:

Most physicists accept something like Bohr and Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation. This holds that there is no essential reality beyond the quantum description, nothing more fundamental and definite than probabilities. Bohr coined the notion of “complementarity” to express the need to relinquish the expectation of a deeper reality beneath the equations. If you measure a quantum object, you might find it in a particular state. But it makes no sense to ask if it was in that state before you looked. All that can be said is that it had a particular probability of being so. It’s not that you don’t “know,” but rather that the question has no physical meaning. Similarly, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is not a statement about the limits of what we can know about a quantum particle’s position, but places bounds on the whole concept of position.

In other words, they are saying that the quantum description of the world beneath the atomic level is it and all about it; nothing more to see, folks, just move along.  But there is one nagging doubt, one piece of the jigsaw which remains stubbornly innaccesible, and that is the proposed marriage between quantum mechanics and gravity.  So far,no one has succeeded in wedding these two aspects of 'reality' together and until they do, the description remains incomplete.

(1) Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, ch.6

 

Watts up Al Gore!

Many years ago when I started this blogging lark I was immediately drawn to the Anthropological Global Warming (AGW) campaign which was producing enough heat of its own accord to warm up the earth!  I had no strong views for or against although my cynicism (rather than scepticism, which came later) was on full alert because at my age one has learned the hard way to treat 'experts' with caution especially the more foam-flecked and eye-ball swivelling they appear.  Anyway, I started cruising round the various blogs, the vast majority of which were, so to speak, 'true believers'.  However, there were some doubters and one I came across and immediately took to was Anthony Watts's site Watts Up With That?  At the time he was conducting, with the help of volunteers from all over the USA, detailed and personal inspections of the temperature recording stations upon which the 'Warmers' were basing their 'science'.  It quickly became apparent that, like just about everything else in modern life, huge changes had occurred around these stations which might have begun their existence in rural countryside but were now surrounded by concrete and tarmac and office windows all of which reflected and increased the ambient temperature.  To re-use a tired expression, most of them were 'not fit for purpose'.  Immediately my insipient scepticism hardened into downright suspicion.

Last year, as 'evey fule do know', including and especially the 'fules' at East Anglia University, the whole AGW faith took an almighty hit below the waterline when hundreds of the e-mails circulating between the 'scientists' concerned were hacked and published.  My worst suspicions confirmed I rather lost interest which was naughty of me because one should never underestimate the sticking power of little people with a fanatical belief who have been encouraged in their madness by both Big Business and Big Politics.  And talking of which, the unlovely figure of Big ex-Vice-President Al Gore hoves into view.  This man has made a fortune from technology supplied to alternate energy producers who have been in receipt of massive government handouts 'over there'.  So he receives the tax-payers' dollars at one remove.  The other week, he was given 24 hours of prime TV time to pump out his propaganda and 'prove' that AGW is a 'clear and present danger'.  At this point, re-enter the redoubtable Anthony Watts to apply his fearsome forensic skills on one particular example of what turned out to be a 'lying lie' from a 'lying liar'!

In the film, Gore purports to show a very simple experiment which he, himself, describes as "high school physics" with the implication that his younger viewers could easily replicate in their school labs.  It involves two glass jars being heated.  They both contain thermometers but one is filled with ordinary air whilst the other is filled with CO2.  There then follows a shot of the two thermometers with one climbing rapidly faster than the other - and you can guess which one that was!  Watts remained unconvinced and decided, in the highest traditions of the very best of science, to try and replicate it.  He was minded to do this because, as an ex-TV man himself he was deeply suspicious about the sequence of film showing the two thermometers.  I will not attempt to paraphrase his disection of Gore's jiggery-pokery but instead urge you to read it yourself, or, if you are non-technical like me, then skim-read it because all will be quite clear.  Apart from anything else it will remind you that whilst a picture might be worth a thousand words it's only because it can lie just as well!

And talking of thermometers brings me on to, er, thermometers!  Well, these 'thingies' are a bit more complicated than the glass tube that 'Nursie' sticks in your mouth but they do a similar job for scientists measuring so-called 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere.  Alas, these instruments upon which the AGW 'Warmers' have been relying turn out to be about as much use as Watts's weather stations surrounded by concrete.  The Climate Realists site has the details:

Researchers from Canada, USA, Mexico and Britain this week announce a startling discovery that destroys 20 years’ of thinking among government climatologists.

Climate scientists had long believed infrared thermometers measured thermal radiation from the atmosphere and assumed it was 'proof' of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE). Their assumption was that infrared thermometers (IRT’s) were measuring ‘back radiated’ heat from greenhouse gases (including water vapor and carbon dioxide). But damning new evidence proves IRT's do no such thing.

Now a world-leading manufacturer of these high-tech instruments, Mikron Instrument Company Inc., has confirmed that IRT’s are deliberately set to AVOID registering any feedback from greenhouse gases. Thus climate scientists were measuring everything but the energy emitted by carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Read it and weep - with laughter!

 

Oh, no, not just when I was beginning to understand it!

Scientists - heh!  You can't rely on them for anything.  Here's me, with a book-shelf full of books purporting to explain Einstein's theories, none of which I ever finish because what skulks in my skull pretending to be my brain is actually coagulated dandruff gathered over the years, and the one single thing I do understand and therefore cling to is that the speed of light is inviolate.  You could put Lewis Hamilton on a sub-atomic particle but not even he could go faster than the photon of light running alongside.  Up until today that is!

The BBC reports that scientists at CERN have fired off some particles down their version of the Bakerloo line which runs under the Alps, and guess what, the little critters arrived early!  Which is more than London Transport ever manages.

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

Still, unlike all those climate (so-called) scientists, Antonio Ereditato, the lead author on the published paper knows how a proper scientist should behave:

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

Good man!  And I hope those little scamps did run faster than anyone thought they could because I have always had my doubts about Einstein and his mad theory - well, my dears, that hair! - and now maybe I won't have to waste even more time and money buying books which fail to explain what the daft old codger was on about.

 

One last chew and then you can spit it out!

(This follows the subject matter of the three previous posts.)

The last bit of trickiness arising from this sad tale of the unexpected earthquake which virtually destroyed L' Aquila in Italy which I would like to dwell upon concerns the all too common disputes between experts and non-experts in the fields of science and technology.  My own very slight personal experience of this sort of thing came years ago as a teenager reading Nevil Shute's No Highway and later seeing the film with the great James Stewart.  This story written in 1949 tells of a lonely scientist's efforts to convinve the authorities that the cause of an aircraft crash is metal fatigue which he worked out using a (fictional) version of quantum mechanics.  He is an awkward cuss with few social skills and his interest in the symbolic meanings of ancient Egyptian pyramids is used against him when he tries to get people to take his ideas seriously.  In the end, of course, he is proved to be correct and the consensus opinion of the scientific hierarchy wrong.

In L' Aquila, a local man with a scientific background but no high degrees or published works to back his opinions, undertook regular measurements of radon gas emissions, this gas being endemic in the area.  I am not quite sure exactly what he was doing but it was based, I think, on his theory that the nature of the gas changed when tremors were imminent.  Consequently he warned that the chances of a big tremor hitting were very much greater than the 'experts'.  He ran his own open blog on which he published his data and his theory and so many people were reading it and becoming panicked that the authorities decided to place him under investigation.  A big-ish shock occurred the same day, and the really big one hit about five days later.

Does that remind you of something?  AGW, for instance, although in that case the concensus science is the one predicting enormous catastrophes whilst the 'maverick' outsiders are denying it.  The 'Warmers'/'Changers' (at the moment they appear not to be certain which climate they are forecasting!) have retreated into their stockade defended by 'peer review' which in practice means reviews conducted by other scientists (and sometimes friends) who agree with them.  Happily, we now have 'internet review' in which everyone and his uncle can join in, although that mass rapidly filters down to a few very expert blogs whose owners are extremely knowledgeable.

So, yet another intractable problem to add to the others I have referred to.  I certainly do not pretend to have solutions.  I only ask for complete openness on all sides so that we, the public, can best decide for ourselves.  However, I would add that a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to 'experts' is often very good for your, er, health!  Unless, of course, it is your local cardiologist telling you that your indegestion is actually a sign of an impending stroke and the prat selling you homeopathic lichen is having you on!

'What's a body to do?' you may ask.  'Pay yer money and take yer chance', is my fairly useless reply.

 

So keep on chewin'!

(This post follows on from the two preceding posts.)

In the comment thread to my preceding post my commenters pointed up the fact that I had failed to make absolutely clear exactly what the unfortunate Mr. Fish, the weatherman, actually said on his famous night of the 'hurricane' that never was.  In doing that, of course, they illustrated exactly the next point I wished to raise, that is, the difficulties of using language correctly.  The word 'hurricane', for example, means one thing to a weatherman, that is, a wind of a particular measurable force which places it in one category, 'hurricane', rather than another, say, 'gale'.  But to the likes of me and you, those 'gales' which battered Britain in 1987 were indistinguishable from 'hurricanes', being winds of such force that none of us had ever experienced the like before.  And several people died as a result.

Returning to Italy, after the conference of seismologists which, due to the near panic developing  was moved from Rome to L' Aquila, two of the scientists and two 'civilians' (so to speak) came out to talk to the press.  It was at this point that the inherent problems of probability and possibility were doubled by the problems of language.  "Words, words, words", the gloomy Dane complained but in this context of approaching catastrophe words really did matter.  The mixture of scientists and 'civilians', each putting a greater or lesser emphas here or there merely added to the confusion.  But are there any 'correct' words in such circumstances?  I am reminded of the terrorist security gradings issued by HMG which are issued with colour grades to assist understanding.  One can imagine the man-hours invested by civil servants in parsing as exactly as they can the precise distinctions between each grade of risk.  But do they actually help?  At which point on the scale do you decide not to use the tube or an airport?  Probably the day after an atrocity which speaks volumes!

What was that?  Did someone ask what the solution was?  Haven't a clue, old boy, I always rely on gut instinct!

ADDITIONAL:  By coincidence, a good friend of mine, Mark Bannister, who combines computer 'geekery' of the highest order with a brilliantly creative musical talent - he composes music for all my theatre productions - has just written a post on the subject of the old NASA 'clunker' about to fall to earth in a shower of bits and pieces, and the liklehood, or not, of being hit.  An odd coincidence of minds pondering the same subject.  Worth a read.

 

So let's chew on it, then

(It is necessary to read my preceding post to understand this follow up.)

My title is derived from my previous post which raises an almost 'perfect' storm' of intractable problems.  First of all, should scientists be held legally responsible for forecasts they make in areas of science which are inherently 'chaotic', that is, areas in which exactitude is impossible and only probabilities can be offered?  A prime and infamous example was our very own Michael Fish from the Met Office who, back in the '80s, laughed off the silly notion of approaching storms and we all woke up the next morning with perhaps one the biggest weather disasters the country had ever experienced.  Mind you, Mr. Fish, rather foolishly, did not talk in terms of probabilities, he simply denied that it would happen. 

Returning to L' Aquila in Italy, the seismic scientists, who try to seek certainty in an equally 'chaotic' sytem, did not tell the people that there would be no earthquake, they limited their forecasts to the fact that there was a 2% chance of an earthquake.  At this point we move from science to language.  How many people truly understand the inherent meaning of 2%?  And how many can weigh that 2% against the catastrophic disaster if they 'bet' the wrong way?  I use the word 'bet' advisedly because there are far more punters than there are bookmakers and on the whole punters tend to end up poorer than bookmakers which indicates to me that very few people understand the mathematics of probability, or, 'odds', as the bookies call it.  Let me put it this way, if a seismologist tells you that the chances of an earthquake is only 2 in a hundred - but you will die if the 2% comes up, then that sets the problem in a new framework for a punter to decide.  But, I am tempted to ask, why 2%?  Why not 3%, or 1%, or even 5%?  Scientists like exactitude but is it responsible of them to provide an exact probability when in fact there can be no exactitude?

This is an important point because increasingly inexact science is being used to propel social-political aims.  I think back to the days when the anti-smoking lobby insisted that lung cancer was caused by smoking where-as even a quick glance at the charts indicated that age was obviously an important factor but somehow the slogan 'Die young and you won't get lung cancer' is hardly inspiring.   Also, sex rears its ugly head!  As you can see from this chart, smoking trends are down in men and so are the incidents of lung cancer.  But women, too, are smoking less but their cancer rates are increasing!

I have no wish to be drawn into that old debate, I use it merely as an illustration that scientific pronouncements of a statistical nature should come with a 'health warning', particularly if they are issued by scientists expert in one specialist subject but not necessarily equally expert in the arcane complexities of statistical mathematics.

But the overhanging question is, should scientists be held legally responsible for their pronouncements?  Should we, to put it crudely, have sued the arse of Michael Fish?  Here-in lies the dilemma facing the Italian judges asked to pronounce on the guilt or otherwise of the Italian seismologists whose pronouncements were wrong and 308 people died.

(Alas, I am off, reluctantly, to the dentist but I shall return - I hope! - because there are even juicier difficulties arising from this tragedy.)

Now here's a juicy wrangle to chew upon!

I do not wish to sound my usual flippant self on this topic because some 300 people have died and several men face criminal responsibility charges.  The topic has been reported elsewhere but, with other important matters playing out in the news, it has been pushed to the inside pages.  My remarks are based on the report at the Nature site.  Apart from the particular complexities of this case, there are very much wider implications for science in general and us in particular.

I will try to sum up the story briefly but read the full report for the details.  In 2009 an earthquake hit the medieval town of L'Aquila in Italy.  This town, situated in a traditional area of earthquakes, had been suffering low-level tremors for several months and the population was becoming increasingly worried.  The general tenor of the information put out by the Italian scientists specialising in earthquakes was that periods of frequent low-level shocks, known as 'seismic swarms', rarely precede major earthquakes.  Note the word 'rarely' which is not the same as 'never'!  (This is, perhaps, an example of 'consensus science', an expression all too familiar to those of us who follow the global warming (AGW) controversy.) 

However, in this case there was, as in AGW, a 'denier'.  A local man who, whilst having a scientific background, did not have any high-ranking degrees to his name and who had not published, with peer review, the results of his scientific enquiries.  Instead of analysing seismic patterns, he measured re-actions in the radon gas which is endemic in the area.  He published his results and predicted that a 'quake was highly probable.  The local authorities, irritated by the alarm his reports were causing in the local population, took legal action against him on the 30th March 2009 - and on that day a 4.1 magnitude tremor shook the town of L'Aquila.  By now the townspeople were really worried and in response the authorities called on the top seismic scientists to hold their scheduled meeting at which their latest findings were to be evaluated in L'Aquila rather than Rome, which they duly did. An announcement, of sorts, was made by two of the scientists, the mayor and a civil servant to the waiting reporters in which they attempted to translate scientific complexities into language suitable for non-scientists which would be further 'translated' by the popular press.

The result is best described as a shambles of misunderstandings, mis-statements and mistakes.  The local people were somewhat pacified but then, on the 6th April, the town was hit by a 5.1 'quake and the ancient buildings collapsed killing 308 people.  To add one further ingredient to this witch's brew, in 1985 a man in charge of civil protection in the earthquake zone was investigated after he ordered the evacuation of several villages because of the threat of a severe seismic shock - but nothing happened!

So here we have a nice mixture of professional science and 'amateur' science, language and liability, mathematics and understanding, probability and probity.  I would not wish to be a judge in this matter.  I hope to return to this fascinating and intricate tale tomorrow, provided I have recovered from having a tooth out in the morning!

 

Doncha' just lurve those 'Amurican' lawyers?

Yes of course you do because you all spend a disgraceful amount of time watching their adventures on the 'telly'.  Every other blasted programme seems to feature American lawyers.  It all started years ago, I suppose, when the strong-jawed, stiff-upper-lipped and tremendously dignified Gregory Peck played the noble Atticus Finch and defended the black kid against a rape charge in To Kill A Mockingbird.  Since then, Hollywood has regularly placed lawyers on heroic pedestals and yet, oddly enough, this has gone hand-in-hand with a mounting detestation of the whole trouble-making bunch of them amongst the American population.  If I had a lawyer's fee for every anti-lawyer joke I have ever seen or heard I would be worth suing!

However, on this occasion I intend to leap to their defence.  Bless their silk socks, they'll do anything for money, including pleading cases on behalf of one of the most despised minorities in America - no, no, not paedophiles or Tea Party activists - I mean those who dare to question Darwinism (the unspeakable swine!), and even worse, those who by doing so upset 'Archbishop' Dawkins of 'The Holy Church of Genes & Memes'.

According to Evolution News, the California Science Center (CSC) has just been forced to cough up $110,000 for cancelling a booked film show called Darwin's Dilemma.  Apparently the film was sympathetic to Intelligent Design (ID), an idea which causes 'Archbishop' Dawkins's eyeballs to swivel in opposite directions simultaneously.  Anyway, the CSC, along with the Smithsonian Institution, and LA County Museum of Natural History, were all hauled in front of 'dee judge' for infringing the First Amendment Rights of the American Freedom Association.

Next in the dock, according to the Times Higher Education, was the magazine Applied Mathematics Letters which had begun by accepting a reviewed paper from Granville Sewell, professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, which posed criticisms of the awesome 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but then withdrew it when the author's sympathies to ID were brought to their attention.  Sewell reached for his trusty lawyers and, lo, he won an apology and $10,000.

Finally, and almost unbelievably, I turn to The Guardian of last February which covers the story of:

Dr Martin Gaskell [who] applied for the position of director at the new MacAdam student observatory at the University of Kentucky. He stood "breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience" according to the chairman of the selection panel, but he did not get the job.

Gaskell, an Englishman by birth, is a devout Christian and also expresses doubts concerning Darwinism.  According to 'The Graun', his doubts are more nuanced than your average Bible-thumper which is hardly surprising in a man whose expertise lies in cosmological physics, in general, and massive black holes, in particular.  He was applying for the job of director of the University's observatory but his 'politically incorrect' views on biology were held against him and he was passed over.  After years of delay the university finally caved in and settled out of court for $125,000. 

God Bless America - and American lawyers!

Incidentally, the lawyers concerned were, in order:

William J. Becker Jr., of the Becker Law Firm

Pete Lepiscopo, of Lepiscopo & Morrow

Francis J. Manion, American Center for Law & Justice

So, let's hear it for American lawyers, altogether now - hip-hip-hip . . .  . . . oh come on, you can do better than that  . . .

 

Gotta love this one!

I am always a sucker for nay-sayers and the more fervently any particular opinion or scientific theory is held, the more I cheer on the gadflys who buzz in and shout, "Bollocks!"  Well, except, of course, when it is an opinion or theory dear to my heart!  Anyway, some time ago I stumbled across this site which offers "counter examples to the theory of relativity".  Because I can never quite get my head around Einstein's theory then, like every other ignoramus in history, I join in with the sneers and jeers.   I remember years ago reading the emminent British journalist, Tom Bethell, in The American Spectator, who maintained a constant barrage of criticism against relativity, and admiring his nerve and, to be fair, his persuasiveness.  Anyway, this particular site offers not one refutation but 35 "counter examples", although I'm not sure precisely what they mean by that, however, one in particular took my fancy:

The barn and ladder paradox: Person A has a ladder too long to store in his barn. Person B takes the ladder and runs very fast into the barn. For A the ladder will contract, and if the velocity is fast enough, it will fit in the barn. But to B, who is moving with the ladder, it is the barn that will contract, making the problem even worse. So, who is correct? Does the ladder fit in the barn? This problem was considered in the book Introduction to Electrodynamics by David Griffiths, and the author, who supports Relativity, claim that both are correct. The ladder both fits and doesn’t fit in the barn. This is obviously against elementary rules of logic.

If you are a maths and physics swot, please don't bother to try and explain it, I'm too thick!

 

I see the future - bugger! who put that step in the way?

Human beings are prone to wasting their time.  If they are sensible they confine themselves to wasting their own time but on occasions, if they are determined to be tiresome, they insist on wasting other people's time, as well.  I am something of an expert on this time-wasting lark because, you see, I am wasting your time now even as you read this daft blog post!  However, rather like my theatrical efforts, at this I remain a stumbling amateur but there are others who are so brilliant at wasting everybody's time that they become a positive menace.  Take futurologists - no, please, please, do take them and do something to them they never imagined would happen, just to please me and also for the rare pleasure of seeing the surprise on their faces.

I am back to The Boston Globe again, this time in the amiable company of Graeme Wood who reports on the activities of some ultra-futurologists beginning with our very own, home-grown one, Prof. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, no less, and the winner of the $1.7 million 2011 Templeton prize - crikey, I bet he didn't see that coming!  This terrific maths and physics swot told the Royal Institute of Terrific Maths and Physics Swots the other day:

Our sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out [...] It won’t be humans who witness the sun’s demise: It will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.

Well, he might be right, but there again, he might be wrong, after all, going by past experience the predictions of Futurologists are not something you would bet the deeds of the house on.  Anyway, apparently Oxford University has opened a new department - The Future of Humanity Institute.  I assume they have seen the future and despite current restraints remain confident of endless expenditure on dotty university projects well into, er, the future.

There are, it must be said, some interesting conjectures to be enjoyed, for example, according to one contributor, Sean Carroll, a major swot from (where else?) - California:

[T]o a cosmologist steeped in the vastness of time, 6 billion years may not even seem so long. Carroll puts the sun’s remaining years in stark perspective, noting that one can go further and set one’s cosmological egg timer for the burnout of all the stars in the universe (about one thousand million million years from now) and for the evaporation of the last black holes (about a googol, or one followed by a hundred zeroes, years from now). “After that, the universe will simply continue to expand and dilute, and that will go on forever,” he says.

Well, it's all fascinating stuff and I suppose if it keeps a few old, tweedy profs off our street corners and out of the parks where they would otherwise hang around drinking dry sherry in front of our precious, little kiddie-winkies, then why not?  But, as I read Mr. Wood's interesting article a nagging suspicion started to jump up and down in the back of my mind - yeah, yeah, I know, plenty of room there - and it wasn't too far down his report when I read these ominous words from some cove called Nick Bostrom who I already think of as a sort of latter-day Ernst Stavro Blofeld:

Thinkers about the future deal constantly with those who dismiss their speculation as science fiction. But Bostrom, who trained in neuroscience and cosmology as well as philosophy, says he’s mining the study of the future for guidance on how we should prioritize our actions today. “I’m ultimately interested in finding out what we have most reason to do now, to make the world better in some way,” he says. [My emphases]

At this point I left the article at a run, screaming, "Oh no, not another one!"  Still, finishing as I began, if you want to waste your time go and read it, it's a good article and it does make you think.