DUFF & NONSENSE!

Curing the sun's acne is not a good idea!

I have warned you all before, many a time and oft', that the lack of spots on the sun would drive you all to pulling out your Long Johns from the bottom of your cupboards!  You may well ask me what the hell I know about sun spots and global cooling and I will tell you honestly - zero, zilch and nada!  However, I know a man who does - Anthony Watts on his superb site Watts Up With That?.

Now he is too good a scientist to say definitely that the lack of sun spots definitely leads to cooling on earth, he merely points to a strong historical correlation between the two.  Needless to say, this being a scientific dispute there are plenty of dissident voices denying the possibility - and you can read many of them in his 'Comments' section.

However, I have the clinching evidence denied to just about everyone else.  The sun spot activity definitely started falling away a few years back and this year, down 'ere in 'Zummerzet', the tropics of England, we have had not one but TWO snowfalls!  Need I say more?

 

A sideways glance at the late Stephen Hawking

Not mind you, that I have anything useful, let alone illuminating, to say about the man.  For a start, I couldn't understand a word he was either saying or writing.  The electronic voice-box he used was indecipherable for my poor old ears, and whilst I made a brave attempt to read his book, I never understood a word of that either!  I hasten to add, of course, that all of the forgoing says very much more about me than it does about him!  I gather from the obits that politically he was very much a 'Leftie' which is a comfort to a 'thickie' like me because it shows that understanding the universe doesn't help much in understanding the ways of the world!

However, over at The American Thinker, Mr. Richard Jack Rail takes an oblique but original look at Hawking's life in the context of our fashionable support for killing unborn babies if they are likely to carry the slightest blemish, or even worse, if they are likely to be an inconvenience!  Of course, Mr. Hawking was apparently perfectly normal when born and it was only much later that he developed the excruciatingly cruel disability that was to ruin virtually his entire body with the miraculous exception of his exceptional brain.  However, as Mr. Rain indicates in a sort of 'thought experiment', had Hawking's parents known that this disease was likely to strike their unborn son, would they have been tempted to abort him?  In that position, I certainly would have been!

 

 

The Sunday Rumble: 11.2.18

Peter Hitchens is a national treasure:   There is nothing like waking up on a Sunday morning and enjoying a spicy serving of his Sunday Mail column.  Today, in typical fashion, he pulls on his 'bovver boots' and gives those stupid, dangerous, old harridans, the suffragettes, a right good kicking! For reasons beyond me, and him, they have achieved almost saint-like status since they first kicked off their murderously stupid campaign which was not only dangerous to innocent people but which actually delayed the granting of votes to women.

 

And then there is Dan Hodges:   Also in the Sunday Mail and well worth a read not least because despite his Labour party background - he resigned recently - he offers as close to a detached view of our politics as it is possible to find.  Today he highlights the fact that recent polls indicate that 'Jezza's' momentum (no pun intended!) is running out of puff.  People are pissed off with the Tories but gradually the true nature of the MLP (the Marxist Labour/Looney Party - you choose!) is becoming clear.  Suddenly, the awkward, stilted 'St. Theresa of May' doesn't seem quite so bad after all.

 

Did the 'Warmers' get anything right?   I ask because for years now I have been waiting to sing my special song, 'Tootle-oo, Tuvalu', as that tiny Pacific atoll disappeared beneath the waves, a fate which the 'Warmers' had predicted with certainty.  Now however, some New Zealand university spoilsports have pointed out that whilst sea levels may be rising, so also are atoll heights increasing!  Ain't gonna happen, folks!  Why am I not surprised?

 

Thank God Christianity is in its dotage:   I have started reading my latest book purchase, The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle and so far my first reaction is relief that Christianity seems to have got over itself and slumped into harmless old age and inertia.  Well, of course, it's not Christianity's fault that so many 'zillions' of people perished in its name because, as always, it was the dreaded 'Peeps' who were to blame with their ferocious squabbles over what, exactly and precisely, constituted true Christianity.  The end result was that Europe ended up knee deep in blood.  I have a vision of God sitting 'upstairs' on his throne, holding his head and groaning, "No, no, I didn't mean that  . . ."

 

Talking of books, I have a 'retro read':   During part of our recent winter break we found ourselves in a rather odd book shop which sold paperbacks at three for a fiver!  The 'Memsahib' was 'in like Flynn' and instantly picked a couple of bodice-ripping yarns whilst I stumbled over a copy of one of Scott Turow's legal thrillers which, to my surprise, I had not read.  I really enjoyed his books and I can't quite think why I haven't read any for 'yonks'.  Anyway, it's back to 'Judge Mason at Kindle County courthouse' which, at least, will give me a break from the non-stop savagery of reformation Christianity! 

 

'Oxfam' should be starved!   I have always detested Oxfam as a charity ever since it became increasingly political over recent decades.  Many years ago I determined never to contribute to it in any way.  Thus, I am not particularly surprised that it has been caught out indulging in the worst sort of sexual depravities in various disaster areas around the world.  Let us hope that our normally feeble government follows up with some 'stern disciplinaries'!

 

Who's the dumbest critter in this photo? 

Tanner Broadwell holds his dog with Nikki Walsh at Madeira Beach, Fla., on Wednesday, Feb. 7,

Clue: it ain't the pug!  According to AJC News, this couple sold everything they possessed in order to buy a sailing boat and do, well, do whatever it is you do on a sailing boat, you know, like throw up, get lost or, in their case, sink!  After only two days at sea and in only 8' of water!  You couldn't make it up!

 

That dauber, Rubens - what an operator!   I am only part way in to Leanda de Lisle's history of Charles I but one character keeps making an entrance.  I refer to Sir Peter Paul Rubens, he was knighted by both the king of England and the king of Spain, and he was the dauber-of-choice to the royal heads of Europe and their gentry.  He churned out portraits faster than my printing machine and he was paid enormous amounts of money for doing so.

To be honest, most of his work is not to my taste.  Click on my link and scroll down for a selection of the incredible number of paintings he produced and then decide for yourself. Personally, I am not too keen on exceedingly plump ladies with thighs like rugby players!

 

Maybe I cheered too soon:   Well, I'm not a deep thinker - waddya mean, ya noo already? - so my immediate re-action to Trump's recent 'yuuuuuuge' tax cut was to throw my hat in the air.  Alas, now I have received several reminders concerning America's national debt which, apparently, Trump's tax cut will increase by several '$zillion'.  Then, of course, there is our very own national debt which absolutely no-one seems to concern themselves with and which continues to inflate inexorably.  God and Karl Marx are the only people who know what will happen if 'Jezza' and his comrades take over!

 

No more rumbles today

 

 

I wish I could read this book

Not, mind you, that I am short of books, in fact, that is one of the problems with Kindle, you can rapidly build up a entire library without being threatened by a teetering pile of 'waiting-to-be-read' books.  Happily these days in my dotage, rather like attractive ladies, there are some books which instantly fire my interest but a moment's thought makes me admit that I could not cope with them.  Such a book is "The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science" by Karl Sigmund which is reviewed at the WaPo.

I came across that gang of ferocious swots, aka: 'The Vienna Circle', years ago when, in my more youthful cockiness, I sought to read and understand one or two of them. Yes, you're right, Big Fail, but, dammit, I tried, I really tried.  People like Karl Popper, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel and Ludwig Wittgenstein fascinated me because whilst I could never understand the totality of their thinking, I could, very, very occasionally, just catch a glimpse of their brilliant intelligence.  Not, of course, that they were always and forever right about everything, as some of them admitted.  Even so, from 1924 to 1936, every other Thursday evening, some 10 to 20 of them would meet informally to express and discuss and no doubt disagree with the truly great and complex ideas that concerned them.  Was there ever, before or since, a greater collection of intellectual power gathered in one place?

 

One good pic' is worth a thousand lies

I give you this very fine example which has driven the 'Warmers' to a frenzy.  Apparently - and I urge you to emphasise that word in your mind - this is the 'evidence' that all those poor, likkle, cuddly-wuddly polar bears are starving to death because of - natch! - Global Warming!  It has the enthusiastic support of the likes of Michael Mann, the inventor, and I use the word advisedly, of the infamous 'hockey stick' graph.  He has been supporting forecasts that half the polar bears in the world will be decimated by the middle of this century due to melting ice keeping them from their feeding grounds.  Alas for him, several recent investigation aver that the polar bears are actually doing very well.

Still, if a good photo fails to convince then why not photo-shop a totally false one to, er, 'prove' your point:

Well, that's what the, er, 'distinguished' climate scientist Peter Gleik did in his paper entitled, without a hint of embarrassment, "Climate Change and the Integrity of Science".  I am amazed that he managed to spell the word "integrity" correctly.  Ten tons of offal fell on his head when all those smart Alec, photo techies immediately pointed out that the photo was a phony.

As so often in this climate change lark I am deeply grateful to WUWT.

 

 

A 'no-brainer', er, that's me!

Last night I watched a terrific swot as he explained the latest developments in quantum physics.  When I went to bed, I had to inform the 'Memsahib' that sex was off the menu because I had a headache - and, no, I am not going to tell you her response which was really quite hurtful!  Actually, the swot concerned gave me the impression that detailed knowledge of the crazy world of sub-atomic particles had simply (or perhaps that should be 'complicatedly') not progressed very far from the days, forty-odd years ago, when I first began to try and grasp it.  The impression I gained from the programme was that although hard, proven explanations had rather stalled, imaginative, esoteric ones had increased enormously and I felt rather like poor Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole! 

We can expect huge advances on three frontiers: the very small, the very large, and the very complex. Nonetheless—and I’m sticking my neck out here—my hunch is there’s a limit to what we can understand. Efforts to understand very complex systems, such as our own brains, might well be the first to hit such limits. Perhaps complex aggregates of atoms, whether brains or electronic machines, can never know all there is to know about themselves. And we might encounter another barrier if we try to follow Weinberg’s arrows further down: if this leads to the kind of multidimensional geometry that string theorists envisage. Physicists might never understand the bedrock nature of space and time because the mathematics is just too hard. [My emphasis]

Oh, terrific, I now feel so much better about myself!

 

 

Spend time in a space station? Eeeeeeeew!

I have an excellent relationship with a neighbour where-by I give him my copy of The Spectator and he gives me the arts section of The Times.  In the books section there is a review of a book by an astronaut called Scott Kelly - no, me neither but these days there are so many of them! - entitled Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery.  Mr. Kelly, it appears, tells it like it is!  They might call it 'a space station' but the fact is that it's a smelly, noisy, dump-truck with CO2 levels often three times higher than the USN allows in its nuclear subs, and the inhabitants need to be careful to avoid inadvertently swallowing mouse droppings (from mice sent up for experiments) or their own urine globules.  Yeeeeees, quite!

Mr. Kelly sounds like quite a character.  A rough man from a rough background who only just qualified as a navy pilot.  As the reviewer puts it, NASA might blather on about the "multi-disciplinary crews for the trip to Mars but most of the human guinea pigs it sends up for long stints on the ISIS are still tough-as-tungsten military types."  Mr. Kelly sounds dead right and whilst I might not want to spend a year with him locked in an inter-stellar cell, my admiration for him, and all the others, is enormous.

 

Darlings, did the universe move for you?

Well, it jolly well should have because I have it on good authority that a massive 'coming together' has just occurred - no, no, no, I'm not talking about sex, behave!  I am referring to two heavenly bodies - and no, I'm still not talking about sex - which have, according to the space swots, collided, er, somewhere out there.  Happily, this head on smash occurred a considerable distance from Planet Earth so the resulting 'shock' wave resulted in a distortion of, well, um, one thousandth the width of a proton, actually, and 'as any fule do no', a proton is really, really titchy!

Perhaps, this less than earth-shattering event was due to the fact that it wasn't actually two bodies that collided but two black holes - and no, I have no idea what a 'black hole' is but according to the swots concerned, one of them was 25 times and the other 31 times the mass of our sun, although how a hole can have mass is yet another of life's mysteries to me.  Apparently, there have been three other smash ups between black holes since February last year so these black holes are obviously out of control and need to be spoken to severely!  Fortunately, our inter-galactic 'boys in blue' are right on the job operating from their Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. 

So that's alright then!

 

Who or what is the PM?

No, no, no, I don't mean the Prime Minister, I mean the Prime Mover!  In the comment thread down below on the subject of Freud and Darwin we reached what I think may be a record at this blog of 49 comments in which God, no God and Godel all began to feature heavily.  I have now decided to banish God - the jury's still out on Godel! - because the word comes over-loaded with pre-conceptions.  Instead, I would prefer to write about PM - not 'a' PM or 'the' PM which tends to personalise the term - but just PM, Prime Mover, which at least has the advantage of neutrality. 

It seems to me that despite the magnificent efforts of the 'swots' - religious, scientific, philosophical - none of them have come close to explaining convincingly how it all began?  I mean, when it comes to the creation of the universe, just saying there was a 'Big Bang' leaves so many unanswered, and unanswerable, questions that it is fairly useless as an explanation.  Then there is the second 'yuuuuge' question, how did hitherto inanimate materials suddenly become animate?  Yes, I have read all those theories about the huge pressures and enormous heat that seared through the depths of the earth as our planet formed but how come that today where we can produced very similar conditions in laboratories, no one has succeeded in producing that spark of animation in hitherto inanimate material?  

There is one other mystery that only occurred to me recently when I read some swot who remarked on the incredible - and it really is incredible - fact that our planet occupies one of the safest locations in the universe, despite the fact that occasionally we are peppered with bits of space detritus, and despite the fact that our sun grows ever hotter (and will eventually devour us), but even so life has begun and continues to thrive. 

It's a mystery!

 

 

First Freud, then Darwin

A couple of posts down below I brought to your attention the murder of Sigmund Freud's reputation in a book.  Today, it is the turn of Charles Darwin who is dissected by A. N. Wilson in his book "Charles Darwin - Victorian Mythmaker".  The reviewer in The Spectator is Harry Mount.  However, he remains impeccably polite, as does A. N. Wilson in his book.  Wilson admits that like most of us he simply accepted the Darwinian theory until, that is, he began to read what later experts had to say.  It has been apparent for some time that Darwin's theory has more holes than a string vest but they have been covered up and Wilson suggests that part of the problem emanated from the religious backlash to his theory which, in turn, produced an even bigger backlash from fanatical atheists like 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins.  Thus, the science was hidden by the religious war that was raging.

You do not have to be a science swot to see the many problems with Darwin's theory although I am second to none in my admiration of his Victorian efforts to investigate the myriad mysteries of life.  For a start, in his lifetime there was virtually no science of genetics.  He simply did the best with what he had available.  Scientific theories are just that - theories!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 20.8.17

Farewell then, Sir 'Brucie':   By and large the deaths of show biz 'stars' leaves me unmoved except, perhaps, for an automatic and human response of 'hope it was quick and not too painful'.  However, the death of Sir Bruce Forsyth did impinge on me slightly more than most, not least, I suppose, because he has dominated my TV set for most of my adult life.  It was not so much his talent that impressed me, after all, there have been very much better singers, dancers and comics than him over the years, but I think it was his unfailing good humour and the absence of vile vulgarity and vitriol that blemishes so many 'stars of stage and screen'.  Yes, given his three wives, each younger and better looking than the last indicates that he was "a very naughty boy" with the ladies but beyond that he seemed to be an exceedingly pleasant fella' and it came across in his good humoured performances on so many TV shows over the years.  So thanks, 'Brucie', you made me smile - a very rare occurrence!

 

How long will 'The Donald' go on?   I do realise that 'the Donald' has an armour-plated ego which simply deflects all incoming shot and shell.  In fact, his ego is of such proportions that that he is probably unaware of most of it.  In that, of course, he closely resembles 'HillBilly' who would have been an infinitely worse President than 'the Donald'.  Even so, sooner or later a lucky shot may get through and cause him to catch a realistic glimpse of the chaotic shambles that is his - and I use the word loosely - administration.  For God's sake, Donald, do get a grip!

 

But now, I almost feel pity for 'the Donald':   I didn't realise how far matters had deteriorated.  According to a piece at Zero Hedge, he has now trodden on MDA's dainty shoes.  As all you regulars know, MDA is My Darling Ann (Coulter), a lady whose pen, or keyboard, is far more mighty than a mere sword!  She is mightily pissed off with 'the Donald' for firing Steve Bannon, a man about whom I must admit, I know very little except that he was a boss at Breitbart, a news outlet I rarely read.  Anyway, MDA is spitting blood and nails so better watch out, Mr. President!

 

Maureen Dowd, inadvertently, gives the game away:   Of course, I have heard of Ms. Dowd but I have never followed her scribblings.  By chance today, I did and amongst a somewhat sentimental remembrance of her father and a generalised attack on Donald Trump, she confirmed a suspicion of mine.  Obviously, as a pious Leftie she complained about the rise and rise of what she would call the 'alt-Right'.  In the course of it she recalls: 

The next day [after Obama's inauguration], I roused my reluctant houseguests for a dawn trip to the Lincoln Memorial, with croissants and Champagne, to celebrate the spectacular odyssey from Lincoln to Obama.

But we were naïve. We should have known it would not be that easy. There were ugly things rumbling beneath the surface and, fueled by that bigotry, Democratic incompetence [my emphasis] and Republican longing for a conservative Supreme Court, Donald Trump found a narrow portal to crawl through to get to the Oval Office.

In the end, of course, we must leave it to the historians to sort out the whys and wherefores of how the USA has sunk to its present fractured state.  However, I have increasingly suspected that Obama has much to answer for.  He, the first black President, arrived promising all that 'hope 'n' change' stuff but all he did was build up false black expectations and drive whites into the arms of the KKK.

 

Oh, what a disappointment:   I checked the A&L Daily site to see if there was anything of interest and, lo, there was an article on Friedrich Hayek, a philosopher for whom I have an enormous admiration but haven't actually read for yonks.  I clicked on and then realised that the host site was The Guardian - 'oh, the horror, the horror'!  Needless to say, the writer was some 'Noo Yawk' Leftie so "I made my excuses and left"!

 

But, oh, what a treat!   There's always something good to chew on at the A&L Daily site, so after skipping 'The Graun's' pathetic attack on Hayek, I found an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (no less!) in which the writer, obviously a psychopath of some sort, took a hammer and chisel and dismembered that old fraud, Freud!  Yes indeed, the psychobabblers' psychobabbler of choice, Sigmund Freud.  What a creepy, old crook he was!  And what good news to learn that psychoanalysts are a dying breed!

 

They're not awfully bright, are they?   I have not conducted a forensic examination of the tactics and/or strategy deployed by Islamic terrorists but one characteristic leaps out - they're mostly as thick as a stack of planks!  They go to all that trouble just to kill a handful of people - including themselves!  Of course, it is a monstrous tragedy for the innocents involved but where is the geo-political advance that presumably the perps sought?  All one can hope is that all those virgins were worth it, although one has to wonder why they're still virgins - yeeeeees, quite!

 

No more Rumbles today

 

 

 

Look, just get that robot out of the cockpit!

Actually, because travelling almost anywhere has become a right, royal pain in the rectum, and because I no longer live under a flight path, I don't really care if the 'brainiacs' insist on having pilotless planes.  However, the chances of me travelling on one are somewhere between 0.0 and -0.1.  And yes, I do realise that a fairly large percentage of pilots like a drink or six, and frequently have a miserable love-life and because they are often married to former stewardesses - nudge-nudge, wink-wink! - they can never be absolutely sure what goes on when they fly to Australia but even so, 99% of them prefer to live than die!  Of course, you do get the odd loony who might dive your plane into the sea but - hey, shit happens!  I will take my chances with all of that but I will never, ever trust my life to a robot.

Lest you think me alarmist, allow me to remind you of all those clever, electronic gadgets you have either purchased or been given as a gift over the years.  What is their common trait?  Yes, they always bloody well go wrong and always just when you need them most!  If you doubt me - surely not! - just take a long, hard look at your computer-thingie and dwell on those moments when you were absolutely desperate to check something out and the bloody-bloody thing stops working.  If that happens in a plane I can just imagine the conversation with the other robot who mans the 'Helpline Desk'!

All of the above, of course, applies to driverless cars as well.  I'm telling you now, you are safer having a grumpy, short-tempered, old git like me behind the wheel than some vehicle which quietly and calmly informs you that you are heading for a wall at 90 mph so please call the Help Desk!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 6.8.17

Talking of Mr. Roberts ... that's Andrew Roberts, the historian ... which I was doing a couple of posts below, I am making slow but fairly steady progress with his biography of the late, great Lord Salisbury.  Given that it runs to 938 pages, weighs a ton and that I am recovering from a hernia operation, you will understand my tardiness!  My initial response to Salisbury's very early years in politics and journalism is that he makes every modern, so-called conservative look positively anarchistic.  Perhaps the main characteristic that shines, or perhaps glares, through his early writings is his vituperative fury aimed at anyone of any party who failed to live up to his ideals of High Church and High Toryism.  He even makes the late Auberon Waugh look like a bit of a wuss!

 

Are the Dems beginning to realise their mistakes?   I ask because whilst the majority of them continue to shriek and whine like banshees against Trump, there are a few quiet, still voices suggesting that their demented harangues are doing them more harm than good.

Politico has this to say:

Democrats are increasingly conflicted about how forcefully to press the issue of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Fearful of alienating voters who appear more concerned about the economy and health care, Democrats campaigning in districts across the country are de-emphasizing Russia in their rhetoric — and some are warning that a persistent focus on the Russia investigation could backfire.

As seen, and heard, from 'over here', their hysteria is hardly impressive!

 

Never play cards with an Aussie!   No, no, no, I don't mean that they would cheat at poker, I wouldn't dream of suggesting such a thing, especially as every Aussie I ever met was roughly twice my size!  No, I am referring to what are called 'smart cards' which, apparently, are built into several Australian temperature recording stations.  They have been programmed to 'disappear' any cold readings that do not comply with what the 'Warmer' fanatics in their Weather Bureau think is proper and which might cast doubt on their insistence that the globe is warming dangerously.  Read all about it!  Why does the phrase 'lying liars' occur to me?

 

Have a sick bag handy:   I have no views on Usain Bolt, the sprinter, because I gave up following athletics decades ago when it became clear that it was a farrago in which the 'sport' was reduced to whether or not our drug cheat can beat your drug cheat.  The fact that there probably were some totally clean athletes taking part only sickened me the more.  Anyway, yesterday we witnessed a two-times drug cheat, Justin Gatlin, win a Gold Medal at the IAAF World Championship.  If Lord Seb Coe wasn't such an arse-licking, international jet-setter he would have resigned from the IAAF years ago.

 

Of course she's a woman, she can't make up her mind!   The Mirror has a story which at first reading you might assume came from its satirical humour section but, alas, it is all too true.  It concerns a lad called Brad who insisted he was female and at vast expense - er, that's mine and your expense! - was turned into a girl.  'She' then changed her mind and decided she was a boy after all and so - voila! - she was changed back and another few thousand quid was spent.  Quite where they found the necessary bits is not clear!  Now, he, she or it have decided that she is indeed a woman and so it's off to the medics yet again.  Accuracy warning!  To be honest this story has me confused so if you want to be sure of the facts go read The Mirror for yourself.  I gather he/she hails from Hull so if you find yourself 'ooooop north' and at a loose end, have a care!

 

Kamm's the man!   I have mentioned Oliver Kamm before on this blog because he was an enormous example to me in my very early days of blogging.  Back then he was a blogger but one of obviously very high intellectual ability.  Me, being me, had the temerity to cross swords with him because, alas and alack, he was a Labour party supporter.  Needless to say, I usually limped off wounded!  Anyway, his ferocious intellectual skills allied to a pellucid writing style soon came to the attention of The Times and today he is one of their leader writers and a columnist.  He has a piece at CAPX which like most of what he writes is well worth reading.

 

No more Rumbles today!

 

 

Mummy, my brain is hurting!

I knew it would but I just couldn't help myself!  You see, there was this programme on the 'telly' all about that bane of my life, Albert Einstein, and so I recorded it and have just finished watching it.  Dammit, why couldn't he keep his smart-arse ideas to himself instead of inflicting them on dummies like me?  I have already told you, many a time and oft', that I failed all my scientific O-level exams but that did nothing to diminish my fascination with Einstein and all those other 'brainiacs' which has caused me to purchase sundry books over the last 50-odd years and to watch TV programmes like the one I have just sat through.  The end result is always the same.  Part way through I detect a gleam of understanding but it is moving at the speed of light and in a nano-second it has gone leaving me with a headache!

Actually, at the very end of this particular programme, one of the 'brainiacs' dropped a tiny thought into the discussion which had never occurred to me before.  He pointed to the oddity that in the whole of this unbelievably vast - and expanding - universe, the inhabitants of one microscopically tiny speck of detritus, Mother Earth, has produced a quite incredible amount of knowledge and understanding of its complexities.  Where will it all end?  I have no idea but I do hope with neither a bang nor a whimper!

 

All's well that ends well

And it's even better when I tottered up the stairs to my attic to read all your good wishes - for which I am very, very grateful.  It's an odd thing this internet friendship lark but it has been very cheering to hear from you all.  Anyway, it all went very well and I am particularly grateful to the Polish surgeon who decided not to emulate what his ancestors in the Polish Lancers did to poor old The Honourable Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby at Waterloo!  It was sufficient for him only to stick his knife into me once and as far as I can tell it was as neat a job as you could wish for.

So now it only remains for me to rest up and test the tea delivery service here in Chateau Duff!  'SoD', of course, is a sod but, dammit, he did rock up here first thing in the morning to help me and the 'Memsahib' get to and from the hospital, so a big 'thank you' to him.  The one single thought that I cannot shake off is what in hell's name it must have been like to live (and probably die) in times before modern medical practices.  A hernia is fairly common but hardly life threatening but I can tell you that it is exceedingly painful and if you were a working man the consequences for you would be enormous.  So, message to self: do try to stop complaining all the time.  Well, I'll try but it won't last!

 

Enter this dispute at your peril

Mind you, the peril you suffer may be nothing compared to that of young Charlie Gard, the 11-month old 'nipper' who is the life or death subject of the legal-medical dispute between the 'quacks' at Great Ormond Street Hospital and his parents.  I don't think I need to rehearse the details which are the subject of global media attention.  Suffice to say that the 'quacks', on the basis of their medical expertise, insist that Charlie be put to death as soon as possible.  His parents, on the basis of their love for their son, are desperate for him to be sent to America for what they admit is very experimental treatment even if the chance of success is 10% or less.

Despite my off-hand description of the medical establishment at Great Ormond Street Hospital, I do not denigrate their medical expertise but my general knowledge of what might be called 'establishment group think' raises questions in my mind.  In particular, I can imagine their 'shock 'n' horror' at the prospect of non-expert parents daring to resist their decisions.  Now, however, there appears to be another set of medical experts who support the parents.  Obviously, there is no way that I, or a collection of Grand Legal Poobahs sitting in sundry courts can decide between these mutually contradictory opinions - although that will not stop them!

The crux of the matter is that Charlie's parents have raised the money to pay for his experimental treatment in the USA so who could possibly object to the effort being made?  In the meantime, why am I worried that a bunch of 'quacks', supported by another bunch of 'Cocklecarrots', should have the power to execute an 11-month old baby before the full gamut of treatments have been tried?

 

Mark Steyn can breathe easy

The legal duel between Mark Steyn and Michael 'Hockey Stick' Mann seems to have lasted longer than the Hundred Years War!  This is mainly due to Mann's prevarication encouraged by an utterly useless American judicial system.  However, help is at hand from, of all places, the Canadian judicial system.  It was in the Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver, that a Canadian scientist, Dr. Tim Ball, who was even more sceptical of Mann's so-called 'science' than Steyn, defended himself against an exceedingly cunning legal manoeuvre known as a 'SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation)' libel suit.  However, the Court decided that if Michael Mann was to defend his infamous 'hockey stick' graph then he would have to hand over ALL of his background research - and they made that an order, not a polite request!

As Dr. Ball explains, “Michael Mann moved for an adjournment of the trial scheduled for February 20, 2017. We had little choice because Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable. We agreed to an adjournment with conditions. The major one was that he [Mann] produce all documents including computer codes by February 20th, 2017. He failed to meet the deadline.”

According to the report at 'Newscats.org' : "Mann’s now proven contempt of court means Ball is entitled to have the court serve upon Mann the fullest punishment. Contempt sanctions could reasonably include the judge ruling that Dr. Ball’s statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State’ is a precise and true statement of fact. This is because under Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team."

That popping sound you can hear in the distance is from the flying champagne corks near Mark Steyn's residence!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 28.5.17

Clever fella', that 'SoD':   Yes, I know he comes on here from time to time talking absolute blx about Brexit but when it comes to these dev'lish, tricksy computer-thingies, he's a wizard.  Can't think where he gets it from but anyway, 'the boy dun good' yesterday.

 

William Manchester, a brilliant bull-shitter:   Oddly enough, for someone like me who devours history books, I have never read any of William Manchester's highly regarded histories although, of course, over the years I had picked up on his stellar reputation which was buffed up by the fact that he had served with the Marines at Okinawa.  If he had left it at that all would have been well but, alas, mere truth was not sufficient and, according to The American Spectator, Manchester was guilty of gross exaggeration (putting it politely) on his war record.  Sometimes the foibles of human nature just leave you shaking your head in disbelief.

 

The greatest dereliction of duty - ever!   'SoD' gave me a book for my birthday on the subject of FDR's wartime leadership.  Obviously, the disaster at Pearl Harbour looms large, well, disasters always do!  I have never quite got to grips with who was most at fault.  Obviously, on the principle that 'the buck stops here', FDR carries a huge share of the blame but there is more than enough to go round the entire general staffs of the US army and navy, they, after all, were the highly trained experts in warfare!  The fact that 'Washington' was actually reading the top secret Japanese communications simply leaves one feeling totally gob-smacked!  Mass stupidity on such a scale is almost unbelievable.  As an orthodox, not to say, extreme agnostic, I can say that one of the tiny facts that might - just might - convince me that there is a God, is the incredible coincidence that the American carriers for some obscure reason were not present in Pearl Harbour at the time of the attack.  Pheeeew!  Wellington's words after Waterloo spring to mind: "It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life".  By the way, I trust that none of my America friends will think I am picking on the USA because this 'septic Isle' has more than its fair share of 'snafus' which we all try desperately not to think about.

 

A new candidate to be the mother of my babies:   Honestly, it's unbelievable how all those ladies to whom I have extended an invitation to become the mother of my babies never respond!  So, more in hope than expectation, I am extending yet another to a lady who has impressed me - 'yuuuuuuugely'!  I refer to Mrs. Melania Trump:   

She is beautiful, she is elegantly stylish and, as far as I can tell, she never says a word!  What's not to like?  True, her taste in husbands is a bit dodgy but I am prepared to forgive her that weakness.

 

Concealed carry, well, sort of:   I was trying desperately to use Mae West's old line about 'is that gun you're carrying or are you just pleased to see me?'  But in this reversed context it doesn't really work:

 As so often, I am grateful to the rascals at I Hate The Media who sourced their story from a site called Bearing Arms which, rather wittily, describes Barack Obama as "being history's greatest gun salesman"!  They base that on the fact that during his reign, 'concealed carry' was passed by 48 States and the numbers using it grew exponentially.  Needless to say, the murder dropped by 14% - whodaguessedit?

 

Glamorous but boring:   I just watched the Monaco Grand Prix, well, sort of watched it because, to be honest, I kept dozing off.  It's a wonderful atmosphere when you are there, as 'SoD' and I were once upon a time, but as an actual race it is totally 'boring-snoring'.  It is impossible to overtake and that is the very essence of Grand Prix racing.  Even worse, that damned Hun won it and the 'Rt. Honourable Sir' Lewis Hamilton (alright, not yet but it can't be far off!) only managed sixth.  Roll on Canada and some proper racing.

 

Give us a kiss and I'll tell you who he is:   The White House sexist?  I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

 This photo was issued by The White House and shows the good, the bad and the ugly the beloved other halves of various national leaders.  They are all named except for that rather happy-looking chappie in the back row.  The others are all 'First Wives' but he is, I suppose, what you would call a 'First Husband' because he is married to the prime minister of Luxembourg who is, er, a man.  Apparently The White House couldn't bring itself to name him.  Here, courtesy of The Telegraph, are the happy couple:

Luxembourg's prime minister, Xavier Bettel, and his husband, Gauthier Destenay, were married in December 2013.  Credit: EPA

Ah, warms the cockles of your heart, doesn't it.  Mind you, I think I'd rather be married to him that that grim-looking, old bat in the blue trouser suit.  She's married to that nasty thug who runs Turkey so you can't blame her for looking a bit pissed off!  Anyway, The White House has been accused of homophobia which is a ridiculous suggestion when you consider who is the current POTUS - who snorted?

 

Auf Wiedersehen, 'Mutti':   So it's goodbye and even good riddance, according to 'Mutti' Merkel.  According to The Telegraph, she has told German voters that they should no longer put any trust in either the US or the UK. 

She said: "The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days.

"And so, all I can say is that we Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands."

Referencing Brexit, she said: "Of course we need to have friendly relations with the US, and with the UK, and with other neighbours, including Russia."

But she added: "We have to fight for our own future ourselves, for our destiny as Europeans."

Why do I always shiver when German politicians start talking about their 'destiny'?  And did she, I wonder, tell her people how much it will cost them to beef their armed forces up to American levels?  (What's the German for 'not bloody likely'?)

 

 

No more rumbles today

 

 

Now pay attention and absolutely no sniggering!

This post is a report on a serious and scientific subject with which I have, er, grappled over the years.  No, no, not global warming, nor the state of Erwin Schrödinger's bloody cat, I'm talking complex, variable, multi-statistics here best summed up by the headline in The Mail:

The changing size of British breasts: How the average woman’s bust has bloomed from a modest 34B to a curvy 34DD like Kim Kardashian in just 50 years!

Now you can see my difficulty immediately because I haven't the faintest idea what '34B' or '34DD' means, they could be the square root of pi for all I know!  It is one of those deeply mysterious constructs (and believe me, they frequently are constructed!) of the sort you come across in quantum physics where a pair of particles might be spinning one way or another and you can only settle the matter by looking but, alas, the mere attempt to look results in a painful nudge in the ribs from the 'Memsahib' - and God help you if try a surreptitious feel!

Anyway, some, no doubt dandruff-ridden, 'smelly-socks' from The Mail has conducted an in-depth investigation and tells us that our frightfully decent, British ladies have now achieved the sort of dimensions only available to Ms. Kim Kardashion:

 

 

I'm sorry but this technical investigation will have to come to an end because, alas, that photo of Ms. Kardashian has left me in an over-wrought condition and I must go and lie down to recover.  Damn, it's very tough supplying you ingrates with all these important stories  . . .

 

 

Happy 450,000th birthday, Britain!

'Strewth, yet another of those creepy co-incidence-thingies!  Only yesterday (see below) I was busy offering sacrifices to the Gods for arranging that wonderful and critically crucial strip of water that keeps us, just, separate from mainland Europe.  Then today, I read in The Mail, that the first Brexit began 450,000 years ago.  It then took a few hundred thousand years more for the job to be completed - well, it always takes ages negotiating with those bloody Eurocrats! - but eventually the job was done. 

Now, whilst I set about finding some vestal virgins - never easy in modern Britain - to sacrifice to the Gods by way of gratitude, the rest of you can repeat after me:

_{This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.}

 

Never mind the mind, what's the matter?

Why do I do this to myself?  Perhaps just as pertinent, why do I inflict it on you?  Sorry and all that but I just can't help myself.  The fact is that I am utterly hooked on all this quantum physics stuff.  I barely understand 0.2% of it, and even that comes and goes!  Anyway, on this occasion you can blame Prof. Adam Frank writing on the subject at Aeon.

He sums up the headache-inducing problem thus:

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.

Well that's bad enough if your interest lies in the nature and behaviour of 'billiard balls' but when you turn this school of thought to, er, well, thought, actually, by which I mean, the mind, then you could quickly find yourself confined in a cell wearing a straight-jacket! 

It all comes back to this thing called 'The Hard Problem' which, put into simple - and I do mean really, really simple terms - attempts to explain consciousness, or how the mind, filled as it is with slippery thoughts, actually works.  Scientists, being on the whole materialists by nature, insist that the mind works entirely according to the laws of physics.  It's all just a matter of, well, matter, and of course, 'as any fule do no', matter behaves in mechanical ways which can be measured. 

Except, it doesn't!

At the sub-atomic level 'matter' dances to its own infinite variety of possibilities.  Any attempt to measure such particles, or quanta, actually interferes with their state of being.  A perfect example of 'now ya sees it, now ya don't'!  So what sort of a basis is that for determining reality?

Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.

Quite so because the real 'reality' is that 'real things' are made up of zillions of totally mad, unpredictable possibility of things each of which may be a 'thing', or merely, yet another zillion possibilities of things and if you so much as glance at them, let alone actually measure them, then you instantly lose about 99% of their 'reality' leaving you clutching at the equivalent of a grain of sand from the Sahara!

That graunching sound you just heard was my brain coming to an emergency halt so I will leave you to read Prof. Frank's excellent essay which, needless to say, explains things much more clearly than I can.

 

 

One of the first of the wicked 'Greenie' witches

I am obliged to Mr. Alan J. Favish at The American Thinker for confirming my deeply held suspicion that most universities are staffed and run by idiots but those situated in California are actually run by the brain-dead!  He brings to our attention the fact that one of the colleges at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) has decided to change its name to the Rachel Carson College.

Rachel Carson, of course, is the 'Great Green Goddess of all Greenies' everywhere and forever.  In 1961, her book, Silent Spring ,was hugely influential and the global campaign that followed led to the cessation of the use of DDT as a means of controlling mosquitoes which carried malaria.  The result was that zillions of 'ickle-lickle-mozzies' lived and, er, zillions of gross, ghastly humans died, especially those under 5 years of age!

Honestly, you have to ask, should we just burn all 'Greenies' at the stake in order to save Mankind?

 

The cat is both alive and dead and Mde. Permatan is both guilty and not guilty

Look, the first part of my title complies exactly with the thoughts of that mega-swot, the late (although he might be alive for all I know!) Herr Erwin Schrödinger and it is in line with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - got that?!

Now, the second half of my title complies with an even more hideously difficult subject, one that is so complex, so filled with paradox that mere mortals will never understand it.  I refer, of course, to French law - yeeeeeees, quite!

So today in Paris, the Court of Justice of the Republic – a special tribunal for ministers, although one wonders why they should be given a special court - has found 'Mde. Permatan', aka: Mde. Christine Lagarde, both guilty and not guilty of abusing her power as the then French Minister of Finance when she allowed a €404 million (£340 million) bung award to be paid to a 'right dodgy dealer' called Bernard Tapie.  Somehow, in some mysterious way, well this is French law, part of the, er, equation was in the form of that Hungarian dwarf, Sarkozy, who, through the blind stupidity of the French public, was actually and incredibly the President!

Anyway, if found guilty, 'Mde. Permatan' faced a one-year term and a €15,000 (£13,000) fine. Well, she was found guilty but the court imposed no penalty!  Look, if your head is aching as you try to understand this might I suggest you return to a study of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, you will find it so much easier!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 18.12.16

That creepy coincidence thing all over again:   Lying in bed this morning I heard on the news that some distinguished quack called Heimlich had died.  Apparently he had invented something which subsequently was named after him as 'the Heimlich manoeuvre'.  Still being half asleep I assumed it was some sort of devilish clever tank manoeuvre invented by a German general in WWII!  Later, as I woke up properly I realised that Heimlich was actually a doctor and the 'manoeuvre' referred to was a means by which people choking to death could be saved.  Anyway, an hour later, sitting here before my computer composing the breathless prose that delights you all - and I heard that! - I took a swig of tea which instantly went down the wrong hole.  Cue: Duff flailing around desperately, crashing into the furniture whilst attempting to get some air into my lungs without drowning in tea.  Damn, how I wished I knew that Heimlich manoeuvre!

 

A bit of seasonal Shakespeare:   I was reminded of this yesterday and also it reminded me that I used to print the occasional poem on this blog for your delight and edification - sorry, did you say something? Anyway, as this one is sort of seasonal being wintery and keeps referring to "green holly" I thought it appropriate.  Also, as it contains some bitter recriminations concerning human nature it will appeal to all you Christmas grumps who can't wait for the season of goodwill to be over!

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

   Thou art not so unkind

      As man’s ingratitude;

   Thy tooth is not so keen,

Because thou art not seen,

      Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:

   Then, heigh-ho, the holly!

      This life is most jolly.

 

   Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,

   That dost not bite so nigh

      As benefits forgot:

   Though thou the waters warp,

      Thy sting is not so sharp

      As friend remembered not.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly...

 

 

   The Trump tsunami:   They should have cancelled Christmas in the Chanceries of the world and kept all those policy wonks at their desks trying to figure out how the world will change under President Trump.  I still don't think there is a full - or even slight - realisation of the way the world will move for all of us.  Ted Belman at The American Thinker provides a few clues and if even half of them come to pass then it will be exceedingly gulp-inducive!  NATO could virtually disappear because it costs the USA a fortune and it is virtually useless for combatting terrorism which Trump sees as the main threat.  Chinese arrogance is likely to suffer some bruises, in fact, it has already begun with Trump's telephone chat with the Taiwanese president.  'Vlad the Impaler' could become Donald's (and thus America's) NBF - New Best Friend.  The Palestinians need to get real because Trump is hacked off with the whole Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio and he believes, apparently, that the formerly soft, neutral line followed by Obama merely encouraged Palestinian intransigence.  Amongst the first things he might do is recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by moving the American embassy there.  There is more, according to Mr. Belman so read his article and then start digging in! 

 

 

GDDS - the latest affliction on Mankind:   Er, well, to be exact, not

exactly the whole of Mankind just the dimwits who support the Democrat

party because this serious affliction is Galloping Democrat Dysfunctional

Syndrome in which the sufferers (who sniggered?) thrash around

helplessly blaming everyone and their uncles for Hillary's defeat.

Apparently, 'it woz the Russians wot dunnit', or if not them, then that 'dirty

rat' who runs the FBI, or, of course, it was the 'meedja', er, even if roughly

90% of them were Dem sympathisers.  Anyway, someone is to blame and,

of course, the fact that the Dem dimwits picked the most dislikeable

candidate they could find, a stupid, corrupt woman whose ego was only

eclipsed by her sense of entitlement had no effect on the outcome!

 

 

Shakespearean dribble:   According to the TLS, some cove has

written a book entitled Shakespeare and Economic Theory - yeeeeeees,

quite!  Well, it's obvious even from a slight knowledge of the scribbler's life

that money loomed large even from his childhood when dear old Dad was

wont to skim by bankruptcy with barely a shilling to spare.  But "economic

theory"?  Can't say I have ever come across that in the plays I have

studied.  Apparently, the author is much taken with Karl Marx - why am I

not surprised? - who was a great fan of 'our Will' thus proving that you can

fill a man with wisdom and he will still remain a fool!

 

 

Fancy a really good headache?   Oh, go on, give it a try!  Just click on

to an article written by Anthony Sudbery, a terrific maths/physics swot

who in no time at all will whisk you off to a land filled with cats which are

both dead and alive at the same time - such fun!  Yes, it's that dreaded

quantum theory lark again but somehow, even though I barely understand

it, it still has the power to fascinate.

 

 

'Brahms and Liszt?'  Not half!   For the benefit of my foreign

readers, the first half of my sub-title is taken from Cockney rhyming slang

- Brahms and Liszt = pissed!  See, you always learn something new here a

D&N, and yes, I'll have a large one, thank you for offering!  Perhaps the

main lesson to be learned from Damian Thompson's fascinating article in

The Spectator is not so much "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs.

Worthington" as don't ever allow your daughter to marry a musician.  And

I don't just mean those hairy rock 'n' rollers, I mean those composers of

frightfully posh classical music.  The cockneys (or more likely some

knowledgeable music swot) had it dead right with Brahms and Liszt, both

of whom were Olympic-standard boozers.  So too were Handel, Mozart,

Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky

and Sibelius.  Not that all classical composers were boozers, Berlioz and

Wagner preferred opium!

 

 

No more rumbles today

 

 

  But don't miss tomorrow's Funnies - there are some corkers!

 

 

 

 

Finally, Mr. Darwin, are you any good at sums?

You will all be immensely relieved, I'm sure, when I tell you this is my final post on the subject of Darwinism, well, until the next time, of course!  Anyway, at this point I would like to introduce you all to my e-pal, Richard J. Bird, well, he's not really 'a pal' because all I did was exchange a couple of e-mails with him a few years back.  What I did do, however, is to read his fascinating book Chaos and Life.  Now Prof. Bird is Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, Oxford, or, an A1 maths swot of the first order!

I have already expressed my doubts concerning traditional Darwinian evolution as a process of tiny mutations which eventually lead to new species.  Prof. Bird puts it this way:

If we assume that mutations are the agents of evolutionary change, the question becomes how to account for mutations of an adequate number and variety to bring about the observed rate of evolution.  The difficulty is that, if mutations are unsystematic, how can they have resulted in such a well-patterned outcome?  The legendary monkeys at their word processors could not write the works of Shakespeare just by chance.  In the history of the world they would not complete even a single line.

If you consider even for a minute the prolific range of proficient and operative life forms that exist, a truly huge number, then, if mutation is indeed random, you have to consider the equally great or even greater number of mutations that were not successful.

Mutation rates would have to be directed in some way in order to produce creatures like those presently observed.  On the face of it there are far too many possibilities that might arise in unpatterned mutation.  [S.W.] Ulam  [another maths swot] has calculated that, if achieving a significant advantage, such as the human visual system, requires 10⁶ changes, then it will take 10¹³ generations in a population of 10¹¹ individuals for the change to become established.  If there is one generation per day, this means several billion years.

All that is merely the tip of the iceberg on which the good ship Darwin might well founder.  So what is the solution?  Well, at this point it is necessary to remind you that my knowledge of mathematics reaches no further than the twelve times table - and I'm not too sure about all of them!  So, when I raise the subject of 'iterated algorithms' you will understand the thinness of the ice upon which I am skating.  Happily, rescue is at hand in the form of Prof. Gove Effinger, a maths swot at an American college.  He (like me!) was entranced by Tom Stoppard's wonderful play, Arcadia, in which a very young teenage girl, Thomasina Coverly, living in the early 19th century has an incredible insight which, due to her untimely death, would not be rediscovered until the 20th century.  Here is an extract which shows her working with her young tutor, Septimus Hodge:

• Thomasina: . . . Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?
• Septimus: We do.
• Thomasina: Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture?
• Septimus: I do not know.
• Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
• Septimus: He has mastery of equations which lead into infinities where we cannot follow.
• Thomasina: What a faint-heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation. You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten.

Happily, Prof. Effinger explains:

The idea which Thomasina discovers, as we find out later from the present day discussions of Hannah and Valentine [in the play], is that of iterated algorithms, that is: the idea of starting with a number (or point), processing it somehow to obtain a new number or point (which you record), and then feeding that new number or point back into the process. You do this "feedback mechanism" again and again, and after a long time you see the pattern which emerges.

It is in these iterated algorithms that the mystery of evolution may be found because when you carry them out - well, actually an individual armed with paper and pencil couldn't do so at a sufficiently high rate if you lived for a hundred years!  So, a computer is required and when that is used a zillion times over with the result of each algorithm being fed back into the next algorithm - nothing much happens!  Which is what you might expect but then, if you keep going, suddenly, out of the blue, you get an extraordinarily different result.  Don't ask me how, and certainly don't ask me why, it just happens.

And here - at last - are you still with me? - we come to the point.  Procreation is, in effect, an iterated algorithm.  In animal procreation, long strings of DNA from two separate donors are joined together, in time the resulting new creature will pass its DNA to join with another to form a new being.  You might call the process a 'sexy iterated algorithm'!  This can happen a zillion times over but every so often that dreaded exception will occur when something totally unexpected suddenly appears.  Here is an example of an iterated algorithm that went wrong (or perhaps right, who knows?) in the pig world where a piglet was born with a very strange face:

So there you have it, well, for the time being because all theories are subject to correction over time as poor old Darwin found out the hard way!  In the meantime, what can one say?  Well, I suppose you can always trot out a bit of Shakespeare, the bloody man has a phrase for every occasion:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

 

 

Ah, Mr. Darwin, how nice to see you again - # 1

I think, and truth is I can't be arsed to check, that it was my e-pal, Bob, who a couple of weeks ago raised the dread subject of Darwinism - yeeeees, quite!  Anyway, it brought back fond memories of old, hard-fought battles of yesteryear that raged across 'Blogdom'.  Actually, now I think about it, it might have been me who raised the subject by mentioning a man I much admire (without totally agreeing with his theory), Prof. Michael J. Behe, the author of Darwin's Black Box.  I described his book as a hand-grenade tossed into the 'All Saints Church of Darwinism' whose leader and prophet is 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins.

At this point I will pause and confess.  I really do not like Dawkins for a variety of reasons but perhaps the main one is the fact that he fooled me, not just a bit, but totally.  The truth is that I read his books and swallowed them whole.  No-one likes to be fooled, least of all a bad-tempered, old grump like me with an over-exaggerated sense of my own intelligence!  Mind you, since those earlier days I have seen and heard a great deal more of Dawkins on the media and really it was his waspish arrogance that began to grate to the extent that I rather enjoyed one or two later books that took him and his 'religion' apart.

The first was Behe's book on evolution which also comes with a 'religious health warning' in that the author postulates the hand of God, albeit, camouflaged as an 'intelligent designer'.  However, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of cellular biochemistry, Prof. Behe leaves Dawkins, a mere biologist, standing alone in his ignorance.  And it is at the incredibly complex level of biochemistry that evolution takes place.  Poor old Darwin (like Dawkins) had next to no knowledge of the subject and based his theory on the living things that surrounded him.  But change/mutation, when it occurs, begins at the sub-cellular level of chemistry in which, of course, mathematics (dread word - for me, at any rate) rules supreme.

To assist the general reader, Behe poses what he calls 'irreducible complexity', by which he means that for any system to function properly it requires all its sub-systems to be equally productive.  Rather than losing us all in the infinite complexity of, say, the eye, he uses the mundane example of a mouse-trap.

As you can see, this little device is made up of various components, the base, a holding bar, a catch, a spring and a hammer which when released catches the mouse.  The first important thing to realise about this device is that all the components must be there and in working order for it to operate.  Their equivalents in the human body, according to strict Darwinism, must have developed independently before, so to speak, they came together.  But then the question arises as to what use, or what benefit, are any of these components on their own, let alone when they are evolving slowly and incrementally on their own?  The main point of Darwinism is that forms arise because they are made up of characteristics that provide an advantage to the owner.  But in the mousetrap analogy, none of the constituent parts are of the slightest use, let alone advantage, to the 'owner'.

Perhaps the most widely discussed example of Darwinian evolution provides a huge advantage to its owners is the eye.  Typically, Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker skims over this like a skater but seems to be unaware of the thin ice supporting him.  He writes, glibly, of some animals having "a light sensitive spot with a little pigment behind it" and suggests that this is situated "in a little cup ... and if you make a cup very deep and turn the sides over, you eventually make a lensless pinhole camera."  Not a word on how this "light sensitive spot" or its attendant "pigment" arose, nor how or why it happened to be rather usefully in "a cup" which was all ready and waiting.  What a happy coincidence!

 

[I'm running out of time so, alas, you will have to wait for the next part - or parts!]

 

 

Hands across the Atlantic - again!

An exceedingly intelligent article from Mr. Stephen Meyer in the NRO but as Mr. Meyer is an advocate of 'Intelligent Design' we should not, I suppose, be surprised!  Before I move on to the detail in his article which is concerned with Anglo-American relations I should pause and try to recollect my attitude to 'Intelligent Design'.  I still remember vividly a holiday in Wales some twenty years ago during which I read Michael J. Behe's hand-grenade of a book called Darwin's Black Box.  I will not rehearse all the arguments that went on as a result of its publication, suffice to say that it blew an enormous hole in the Darwinian religion which then gripped the entire theory of evolution by the throat!  Alas, Behe, I think, weakened his case by introducing God into the equation and whilst the sight and sound of Richard Dawkins having a fit was immensely pleasurable it might have been better to leave God out of it.  Since then, I am pleased to say that an entire army of Darwinian doubters has arisen which, had he still been alive, I suspect Darwin himself might have joined because he too had his doubts.

Anyway, I digress because Mr. Meyer's article urges President Trump to move quickly to offer Britain a Free Trade deal, and moreover, one as free from unnecessary, quibbling, legalistic details as possible.  He lists several strong arguments in favour of such a move but adds these:

Meanwhile, a U.S. offer to Britain — one that does not require the U.K. to relinquish sovereignty, especially over immigration — will alleviate public and market fears of an economic slowdown should EU negotiators prove intransigent. That will help sustain public support in Britain for the referendum result, making an actual British exit more likely to occur and E.U. negotiators more likely to yield.  [...]

A free trade offer will also help repair the U.S.-U.K. special relationship after eight years of intentional neglect and decades of slow erosion as the result of Britain’s gradual absorption into the EU. Strengthening the alliance with Britain will promote U.S. national security because it will free the U.K. to act decisively as a bilateral partner when the strategic interests of our two countries align — as they often have.

I would add that such a deal might be the first in a series which would eventually include all the English-speaking countries of the world.  What's not to like?

 

 

"The envy of the world", as experienced by Anna Raccoon

It is not often I issue a warning about links to another blogger but in this case Ms. Anna Raccoon's description of her treatment in hospital makes for exceedingly tough reading.  It is long, it is bloody, it is disgusting - not her ailments but the response of many, too many, of the hospital staff.  Read it and weep!

 

http://annaraccoon.com/2016/11/17/dying-to-be-heard/

 

 

The Sunday Rumble: 6.11.16

Autistic blx:   I awoke this morning to the sound of some woman bleating on about her son being 'autistic' and how not enough is being done by the government (ie: you and me!) to help parents of autistic children.  Try substituting discipline for indulgence, I muttered, before I switched her off.  It's amazing, isn't it, that these days 1 in 10 children (or something like that) are 'autistic' and yet back in my childhood no-one was.  Another cure for 'autism' might be to hang one in three psycho-babblers!

 

Roll on Wednesday:   It is the proud boast of many Americans that they always do things bigger and better 'over there'.  Fair enough, I suppose, but their ghastly, bloated, embarrassing, never-ending, Presidential elections are the equivalent of the biggest airbag in history.  The situation is not helped by this one being fought by the two worst candidates - ever!  I yearn for Wednesday but I have a sinking feeling that whichever one of them wins, the shrieking, honking flabber-mouthing will go on and on and on!

 

King Lear as you have never seen her before!   Look, I don't want to upset Dan Hodges - he's a bit of a hard man! - but the notion of his dear, old Mum, Glenda Jackson, playing King Lear is a joke.

Lear is the epitome of 'Alpha Masculine Man' (ie: arrogant and stupid) surrounded by his masculine mates.  I know that some women can be exceedingly masculine and assertive but they never manage it in quite the way a man does, and the reason is simple, it's because they're women!  And vive la difference, I say!

 

I'm beginning to worry seriously about Anna Raccoon:  This highly intelligent and fascinating woman has been 'off-air' for getting close to three weeks.  She has made no secret that she is suffering treatment for cancer and I tremble - although I doubt she is! - at the thought of what she might be going through.  Her blog is amongst my very top favourites and I wish her a speedy recovery.

 

Cartoon of the Year:  I tried to copy and paste this when it first appeared in The Telegraph a few days back but it wouldn't work - and my IT Manager, aka: SoD, was too busy 'Boring for Britain' on something or other.  But today, I came across it on Samizdata, a site I hold dear from earliest days in Blogdom.  For the benefit of my foreign readers, it is spoof version of a 400 year old illustration of the Guy Fawkes conspirators.  Brilliant!

 

 

 

 

Did the Earth Move for You?  That is the title of a post from Mark Steyn bringing us up to date with the pending law suit between him and Michael Mann, or "the warm-monger", as Steyn describes him.  The answer is that the earth, or that bit of it which goes under the title of 'the DC justice system', has not moved a millimetre!  Will I live long enough to see Michael Mann vs. Mark Steyn in court, I ask myself?  However, according to Steyn there is some excellent entertainment to look forward to in December when Anthony Watts (of 'Watts Up With That' fame), plus his side-kick, Willis Eschenbach, have been invited to a Grand Gathering of the American Geophysical Union to present a paper that asserts that water vapour is a much bigger factor in global warming than CO2.  Let's hope they can dodge the incoming bread rolls!

 

Ecosexuality? Eh? What?   If you had asked me for a definition of 'ecosexuality' I would have guessed that it was 'posh talk' for having a shag outdoors which I'm sure we have all enjoyed way, way back in the day.  I would have been wrong in this 'mad, mad, mad, mad world' because according to a report by Eric Worrall at WUWT there are, apparently, some dedicated loonies Greenies who believe that to prove your, er, Green credentials it is necessary not just to hug a tree but actually to shag it:

On one end, it encompasses people who try to use sustainable sex products, or who enjoy skinny dipping and naked hiking. On the other are “people who roll around in the dirt having an orgasm covered in potting soil,” she said. “There are people who fuck trees, or masturbate under a waterfall.”

Yeeeeeeeeeees, quite!

 

No more rumbles today

 

 

 

I wish Signor Rovelli had just stuck to ravioli

Not, you understand, that I am a great reader of recipe books even if ravioli is one of my most favourite Italian meals.  Frankly, I prefer to eat it than read about it.  Even so, were I to read a recipe at least I would be in with a chance of understanding it.  Alas, my chances of understanding Snr. Rovelli's latest book lie somewhere between -0.1 and -0.2.  And that is a genuine pity because about a year ago I treated myself to a copy of Snr. Rovelli's first book entitled Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, the slimmest of slim books measuring roughly 4" by 7".  Given my abysmal understanding of modern physics, that is, 20th century physics because I once vaguely understood all that earlier Law of Levers, heat expansion, gravity and stuff, it was jolly brave of me to try again. 

Of course, I blame two people for my ignorance.  The first was that mad, old swot, Einstein, who was amongst the first to come up with barmy ideas about energy, mass and the speed of light.  The second one to blame is 'the Memsahib'.  Her contribution to my scientific ignorance was small but deadly.  From time to time I would take down one of the many books I possess that claim to explain Einstein's theories to the irredeemably thick.  I would sit quietly, concentrating like mad, and then, just as a glimmer of light flickered in what passes for my brain, a voice would call out asking me what I wanted for supper - or some such!  Instantly, the light of understanding guttered out.  But then, back in the '80s, I came across another  scientific 'fruit 'n' nut case' called Richard Feynman with absurd notions concerning really, really titchy things which actually make up all the really, really BIG things  we know about but which behave like loonies on speed!  How, I wondered (for about ten micro seconds because my brain started to ache) could the world operate in one way whilst all the things that go to make up the world behave entirely differently?

As I indicated above, Snr. Rovelli's first book being, dare one say, almost sub-atomic in size, provided me with at least half a chance of grasping these contradictory concepts.  But now he has come out with a proper BIG book and reading Michael Brooks' review in The New Statesman I may have to give it a pass, er, unless 'SoD' is reading this and decides to be nice to his dear, old Dad at Christmas and buy me a copy!  The review opens with a quote from that old loon, Einstein:

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Er, well, thanks for that, Albert, me old mate, but it is not a promising beginning!  However, Mr. Brooks perseveres:

The present challenge to physicists seeking to discover how things really are is to investigate our environment on a scale known as the “Planck length”. Rovelli tries to convey just how small this is. Imagine, he says, a walnut magnified until it is the size of the universe. If we were to magnify the Planck length by that much, we still couldn’t see it. “Even after having been enormously magnified thus, it would still be a million times smaller than the actual walnut shell was before magnification,” he tells us.

Oh God, my brain is aching again!  Why do I try to grapple with this stuff?  The fact is that to understand even a part of it you have to speak the language - mathematics - and I failed all that bigtime at school.  And yet ... and yet ... the fascination remains and like a masochist going back for another lashing, I keep trying.  The big test for me will be whether or not I get past page 25!

Reality Is Not What It Seems: the Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre is published by Allen Lane (255pp, £16.99)

 

Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there?

Further to my grump immediately below on the subject of all that junk we keep dumping on Mars, why am I not surprised that this morning all those boffins are sitting around in the super-duper and eye-weepingly expensive 'control centre'(!) sobbing into their coffee cups because their 'baby' will not talk to them!  Their 'baby', of course, is the very latest 'techno-whizzie-space-thingie' which cost gazillions of tax-payers' money, and which almost instantly turned into a pile of useless junk along with all the other junk they have sent 'up there' in recent years.  If only Steptoe and Son were still around with their horse and cart they could have made a fortune!

My e-pal, Big Henry, takes me to task in the comments to my previous post, for being anti-scientific and even worse for being ungrateful for the marvellous advances since the last century.  No, no, Henry, I am deeply, grovelingly grateful for all most of modern scientific inventions but I would remind everyone that the chap who invented penicillin was a bloke in a white coat with a Bunsen burner.  Now, I could afford that, indeed, I might even be happy to pay for his salary and pension - and even the gas he used in his Bunsen burner!  But these swivel-eyed space fanatics whose great ideas are far in excess of practicality strike me as grown-up 'kiddie-winkies' who think everyday is Christmas!

In fact, thinking back to all this space and astronaut stuff which has cost more than the GDP of most nations, what, exactly and precisely, has it achieved for the benefit of Mankind, as opposed to the careers and wild enthusiasms of the boffins?  Apparently, the space-ship that dropped that load of old junk on Mars is now going to continue circulating the planet whilst it tries to smell any farts extruded by microbes which will prove that life exists there.  So that should be a great advance for Mankind!

 

Be honest, do you give a flying fig what's on Mars?

This morning I woke up to some boffin getting tremendously excited about another squillion-zillion quids worth of junk metal hitting planet Mars.  Let's face it, if we leave much more scrap iron lying around on that misbegotten planet the Greenies (and I don't mean the local inhabitants - if there are any!) are going to kick off with demonstrations and accuse us all of being litter-louts.  Also, I can see that dip-stick Greenie MP standing up in parliament and wagging her finger at us all in case one of those bits of old junk hits a cuddly-wuddly microbe and gives it a headache!

Of course, the particular 'brainiac' on the radio this morning was getting terribly excited about hurling his latest bit of junk onto Mars despite the fact, if I recall exactly, the last clapped-out old banger they left lying around up there never sent back a single message - not even thanks for the ride!  These boffins keep hinting that there might be signs of life on Mars although every picture I have ever seen makes it look like a South Shields beach in January, than which there is nothing emptier!

Needless to say, the BBC interviewers, being greedy consumers of public cash themselves, did not stoop to ask just how much it was costing for all this fly-tipping on Mars.  Just as well, I suppose, I really do not like to start the day with a headache and acute dyspepsia!

ADDITIONAL:   Courtesy of The Coffee House, Dr. David Whitehouse blows away the Martian myths and several of 'The True Believers'.  Well worth a read, not least because he, at least, seems to know what he is writing about!

 

 

Honestly, those inter-stellar hooligans should be locked up!

Look, there's the old universe slowly doing what universes do which is mostly minding their own business when suddenly this bunch of European hooligans send several trillion-zillion of my hard-earned dosh - yes, alright, it wasn't all my money but it's always important to personalise government spending, it builds the anger! - up into the 'wild black yonder' and then, after a few rowdy handbrake U-turns, they deliberately crashed and smashed it into a bit of space detritus which was meandering along doing no-one any harm.  You wait until Capt. Kirk gets a hold of them, he'll teach them how to behave properly!

Of course, in mitigation for what looks like a stellar waste of money, these scientific 'brainiacs' assure us that really, really valuable lessons have been learned.  Oh yeah, what exactly?  Well, they tell us, we'll find out what the earth is made of, as though anyone cared, and in any case we already know more or less.  Or, they plead when they notice your eyes glazing over, we'll find out how life began.  Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it but in the meantime who wants to know - and why?  And what will they be tempted to do when they find out?  And also in the meantime can't any of you space swots think of better ways to blow several trillion-zillion euros?

Of course, I do realise that the sky at night is a beautiful and fascinating spectacle - on the odd occasion when its not cloud-obscured and pissing down with rain - but couldn't they have found something a bit more interesting to aim at than a bit of rubble obviously left over by the 'Oirish' builders who never seem to finish any building works!  I mean, they could have aimed at the north star which would at least have satisfied my curiosity.  I have looked at it occasionally over the years and I still don't quite understand why, with everything else on the move, it remains in the same place pointing north!  I have a theory!  I think the whole universe is just a huge, circular, spinning, painted canvas created by that prankster, God, and the north pole is simply the nail he used to fix it in position.  Well, that's my theory!

Editor's Note:  This blog post was absolutely and definitely NOT written with the aid of three dry martinis!  It's just that sometimes I have these flights of fancy.

 

So, not all bad, then, that Sarkozy

Write a blog for too long and you will find yourself typing words that you never thought possible.  For example, what an intelligent man that Nicolas Sarkozy is, well, in some things at least.  Brenden O'Neill over at The Coffee House provides one example of Sarkozy's intelligence - and courage! - by reporting the Hungarian dwarf's remarks on anthropological global warming, the new religion de notre temps.

In the speech he said, ‘People [talk] a lot about climate change… but the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years. Man is not the sole cause of this change.’ He then said something that struck me as reasonable but which is apparently mental and unutterable: ‘Sahara has become a desert — [that] isn’t because of industry.’

Cue the sight of red-hot pokers being warmed up and ancient torture chambers being re-opened in the Bastille because to the eyeball-swivelling, mouth-dribbling fanatiques of the global warming religion this was outrageous heresy.

The former leader of the French Green Party, Emmanuelle Cosse, said his remarks were ‘hallucinatory’ — anyone who questions the climate-change creed must be on drugs, right? They went ‘beyond the limits of decency’, she said.

Calm down, dear, yes, the ghastly little man has said and done some awful things in his time but this isn't one of them.  In fact, just the opposite, it's the truth!

Eeny meeny miny mo, Hinkley Point will have a go

Honestly, that sexy Theresa is such a tease!  First it's a 'yes', then it's a 'no', then it's 'maybe' and now it's 'yes' again.  Meanwhile the nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point are reaching boiling point and the danger of imminent and premature ejaculation is high!  The French are racing round in circles unsure as to whether to shout about les méchants Anglais or sing 'God Save the Queen'!  They'd like l' argent, of course, but they also wonder whether the cheque will bounce when things go wrong - and they will definitely and absolutely go wrong because they always do, dear!  Meanwhile, the Chinese do what they do best and remain inscrutable!  Actually, that's not really true because they are the noisiest, most temperamental people on earth but these national images are hard to remove.

To be honest, this blog, as most of you know, has an almost never-ending stock of opinions on absolutely everything but, on the rights and wrongs, the ups and downs, the ifs, buts and maybes of the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, alas, this blog is struck dumb, er, mainly because it is dumb!  I have listened to several 'wiseacres' on the radio this morning arguing for and against and all I can do is turn slow circles with unfocused eyes and my mouth hanging open with a huge question mark hovering overhead.  I do have some genuine sympathy for those forced to take a final decision and I thank the Lord it is not me.  The only certainty is that it will be the wrong decision!

Still, there is one shaft of sunlight piercing the gloom, I'll probably be dead before the final bill is presented so the ghostly chuckle you youngsters will eventually hear will emanate from me!

 

Let's hear it for Diego Chelonoidis hoodensis!

What a man - oooops, sorry, I mean, what a Tortoise!  Diego 'Studboy' Chelonoidus was practically the last giant tortoise on the Galapagos but, at the miraculous age of over a hundred, he has fathered some 800 off-spring and thereby saved his species.  According to the report on France24:

Diego weighs about 80 kilograms (175 pounds), is nearly 90 centimeters (35 inches) long and 1.5 meters (five feet) tall if he really stretches his legs and neck.

Alas, certain other, er, critical dimensions are not vouchsafed but I think his productivity speaks for itself.

Little did scientists realize just how effective he was, until six years ago.

"We did a genetic study and we discovered that he was the father of nearly 40 percent of the offspring released into the wild on Espanola," Tapia told AFP.

I may have to fly over to the Galapagos and have a quiet word with Diego and try to learn the secret of his success.  The 'Memsahib' once gave me some little blue pills and assured me they would do the trick but they never worked.  It was only later that I learned from my pharmacist that they were indigestion tablets!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 9.11.16

Sorry, sorry, sorry and all that:  I am conscious, as maybe some of you regulars are as well, that this blog has been slightly hit 'n' miss recently.  Of course, this is partly due to my inherent idleness and my strong belief that one should never do anything today that can be put off until tomorrow!  Even so, there have been some additional factors, not least the travails of an elderly - and she's even older than me so that qualifies her - relative who was taken ill during a visit here and had to be rushed to a local hospital and who has now been taken into a local care home.  This has involved constant visits and entanglements with hospital and social service authorities.  My energy levels, never of the highest even in the best of times, have been somewhat depleted. 'SoD' and his lovely 'bouncing Czech' have been brilliant in helping us get the old lady's belongings from London down to here as she settles into her new 'home'.  Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it but I hope life will calm down a bit from now on.

 

'St. Theresa' fights the good fight:   Yes, dammit, I know that sooner or later things will go wrong, they always do, but a couple of months into her 'reign' and Prime Minister May seems to be pressing all the right buttons.  Her latest move to spread the availability of Grammar Schools is excellent.  What a pity Michael Gove MP, one of the best former Education Secretaries in years, blotted his copy book so badly that he couldn't be re-appointed.  Still, at least we have rid ourselves of that dim, dumb Nicky Morgan MP who has been returned to her appropriate place - bottom of the class!

 

Will the Tory party split?   The last time the Tory party split in a spectacular way was in the 1840s when Prime Minister Peel drove through the repeal of the Corn Laws.  Roughly half the party wished to maintain protection for British landowners, whilst the other half wanted cheap food for the people.  Today we read that Liam Fox MP, one of 'The Three Brexiteers', has been lambasting British industry for rank idleness when it comes to exporting but already whiny Tory MPs are bleating about protection for British industry.  Liam Fox is dead right, as Fraser Nelson points out in The Coffee House quoting these deplorable statistics: "UK exports are a pitiful 27pc of GDP, the lowest figure in Europe. The EU average is 43 per cent."  It will be no good having the freedom of Brexit unless we use it!

 

Oh no, a new MS upgrade:   I have just been advised by my NBF (new best friend), Bill, that he is going to offer me "a bolder, smarter Outlook.com".  Of course, Bill, being American, I am not sure whether "smarter" means more clever or just better dressed, so to speak.  However, what I do know with sinking certainty is that it will take me a month of Sundays to work out how to use it.

 

Where do they find these people?   I mean people like Chief Constable 'Dave' Thompson of the West Midlands police force who, I suspect, should be rapidly sectioned for mental health reasons not just for his own good but for the good of the people of the West Midlands.  This is the total prat who has decided that his female police officers should be free to wear the niquab, the Islamic full facial mask, if they so decide.  So tell me, dear reader, how will you behave as you stagger out of your local and are stopped by something that looks like a Dalek demanding you breathe into a bag?  Yeeeeees, quite!

 

They do things differently 'over there':   You can say that again!  In the UNITED States of America - who sniggered? - it appears to be perfectly reasonable for one of the two candidates vying for the presidency to suggest that millions of American citizens should be dumped in a basket labelled "Deplorables" because they are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it".  The final clause, of course, invites anyone and everyone to think up some even more vicious insults.  If she wins - and yes, it was her - how long do you suppose the United States will remain, er, united?

 

But in the end, truth will out:   And it has certainly come out in full TV view today as 'HillBilly' nearly passes out, stumbles to her car and loses her shoe in the process of leaving the 9/11 memorial service.  Even the WaPo correspondent who has constantly dismissed suspicions concerning her health as a Republican plot now admits that her health is an election issue. 

  

No more rumbles today

 

Right, sit up and pay attention, this is serious!

A truly shocking report has just been released by the RSPTB based on years and years of research by some deadly serious swots from Cambridge.  They have discovered that working in an office could shorten your life span!  And no, they don't mean that you might die of blood poisoning if you accidentally pin your finger to the desk with a stapler - please be serious!  Research shows (to quote a phrase!) that a sedentary office job will increase your chances of dying of heart disease, cancer and galloping piles.

Also, staring at the tits of that gal in the green sweater could make you go blind. 

The RSPTB insist that to prolong your life it is essential to undertake an hour of exercise a day.  Of course, if you go for a run you might get run over by a No. 15 bus so take care.  In addition, a regime of weight lifting might induce an undue strain on muscles and skeletal frame, so only lift one file at a time.

I would add some further health warnings.  Getting up in the mornings can be bad for you, you never know what you might come across outside the haven of your bedroom.  Also, breathing can be highly dangerous, you have no idea of the muck and filth you take into your body!  So my advice is for you to stay in bed and stop breathing, apart from anything else it will save the paramedics from carrying you upstairs and depositing you on the bed ready for the undertaker.

Sorry ... what was that?  Ah, what's the 'RSPTB'?  A very distinguished body of scientists known as the Royal Society for the Preservation of Total Bollocks!

 

In which my synapses collapse

Or if you like, my mind boggles.  Well sometimes problems arise which are simply to huge for even a brain like mine to cope withal, you know, like the square root of -1, or what is my wife's favourite colour, that sort of thing.  Anyway, to try and be a tad more serious, there is a fairly huge problem hovering over us all.  I think we all sense it but to the sound of collapsing synapses and boggling minds we all try to avoid thinking about it. 

Alas for me, two things have occurred in the past 24 hours to force me to consider this mega-problem.  The first was yesterday when a friend told me that there were now available automatic lawn-mowers that you can programme to cut your grass, avoiding all the flower beds and paths and which, when it has completed its task, will automatically lodge itself back into its recharging site.

Then this morning I did something exceedingly rare by actually reading a column in The Telegraph by William Hague.  I should add quickly that I do not have anything against Mr. Hague but I am not an avid fan either.  Anyway, he had picked up on Mrs. May's promise to institute a range of policies that would ensure that 'the system' worked for 'ordinary people' not just the mega-rich.  However, as Mr. Hague shrewdly reminds her, and us, there is a potentially cataclysmic revolution building up and that the first signs are already visible.  The automatic lawn-mower is but one example.

Automation, in all its myriad forms, is going to effect everyone but in particular it is going to have a shattering effect on all those who earn a wage, and indeed, it has already begun.  Just this week it has been reported that the government are in consultations with Amazon to work out a system whereby goods can be delivered by drones directly to customers.  Hey, there goes 'white-van-man'!  That is but one example and there are very many more.  Where it will all lead, alas, I cannot say, not least because my synapses just boggled - big time!

 

Never, not even if you paid me in gold bars!

I am, by and large, a fairly placid sort of a bloke.  My life to date has been mostly fairly boring, even my army service was free of any danger or excitement.  And yet ... and yet ... there lurks inside of me several psychological fears which I take care not to test.  One, which I have mentioned before, is a fear of heights which I recognised around the age of six or seven when I tried to emulate my pals by climbing a tree.  I had to be rescued from the first and lowest branch where I froze! Yes, I know, I was a member of the Parachute Regiment but the odd thing is that you get very little sense of height from a moving aircraft.  Mind you, the balloon jumps were another thing!

The other fear I have which seems to have developed late in life is claustrophobia.  I once travelled through the Channel Tunnel which was fine just so long as the train kept moving.  If it had ever stopped for any reason midway across I would have attempted to dig my way out using my finger nails!  Similarly with tube trains.  Also, I am now exceedingly reluctant to enter lifts and should I ever be locked up for any reason they might have to add the charge of murder to my sheet because I would probably kill the gaoler!

All of which brings me to Major Tim Peake, the British astronaut who has just returned from six months spent inside a sort of airtight tin can in space.  Setting aside the hazard of actually getting up there, to say nothing of the even more terrifying descent, I simply cannot contemplate living inside a capsule for six minutes let alone six months.  Oddly enough, the risks inherent in all the ultra high tech systems needed to ping you up there and bring you down again would not worry me because, simpleton that I am, I have huge unthinking trust and faith in them which is why flying gives me no worries.

But the second they slam the door on the titchy little capsule in which you are strapped for the journey would be the signal for me to panic and vacate my bowels - not necessarily in that order!  Thus, my admiration for Maj. Peake and all those astronauts is simply immense.

 

Sorry, m'Lud, it's my galloping kleptomania - again!

Yes, recidivist, old lag that I am, I have returned to plunder waka waka waka, the blog of my old e-pal, Malcolm Pollack.  Well, the fact is that, unlike this old dustbin of a blog, he nearly always has something intelligent and thought-provoking to say, and even better, he often expresses it succinctly.  This time he poses a moral? legal? medical? conundrum:

Here’s a question for abortion absolutists:

A woman wishes to write a book about abortion. In order to give her work perspective and authenticity, she decides to become pregnant in order to experience an abortion herself. Being of independent means, she will pay all of the medical expenses.

Is there anything morally wrong with what she plans to do? If so, why?

Tricky!  Damned tricky!  But then I am not an "abortion absolutist".  I would say that 9 times out of 10, abortion is an abomination but, dammit, there are always exceptions to just about every rule.  However, when it comes to the proposal above then I think it is a vile and disgusting idea and any perp caught undertaking it deserves life in the 'slammer'.

Still, it makes you think.  He's good at that, is Pollack!

 

 

That 'glup-glup-glup' sound was my brain boggling

Sorry about my absence yesterday but I was hit, not once but twice, with severe GBB - that's Galloping Brain Boggling for those of you unfamiliar with the latest in 'medical-speak'.  The first attack of GBB occurred, of all unexpected places, at my local PROBUS club - and I've told you before that I am not entirely sure what 'PROBUS' stands for but in essence it is a collection of retired old farts who meet once a fortnight to listen to a guest speaker.  Yesterday, the subject was bees - yeeeeees, quite, you can see what us old farts will do to avoid being involved in housework!  Anyway, within minutes I could hear that 'glup-glup-glup' sound in my head!  Hitherto, I had dismissed bees as being one of those bloody things likely to ruin one's picnic.  I had no idea of their, literally, fantastic life styles.  Did you know, for instance, that when a bee finds a source of nectar it flies back to the hive and does some sort of a dance in the dark to indicate the direction of the food supply in relation to the position of the sun - and allowing for the fact that the position of the sun is constantly moving!  Cue: sounds of 'glup-glup-glup'!  I am now determined to find a book on bees!

Returning home with my head buzzing -  "Oh, very witty, Wilde!" - I couldn't find my book on the English civil war but I came across a book I have mentioned here before - I started it but that bloody Charles I interrupted me!  It can truly be described as a slim volume because it only has 82 pages!  Entitled "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics", it is written by an Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli, but it has been excellently translated into English and beautifully reproduced in an elegant hardcover by Alan Lane, the publishers.  It has one other great virtue, it slips easily into a jacket pocket!

In all honesty I cannot tell you that I understood all (any?) that it explained.  As you may have noticed, I'm not that much of a swot and anyway, within a few pages that 'glup-glup-glup' noise began again!  To take but one passage as an example, it shows a reproduction of a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope in space which provided an image of deeper space than any previous telescope.  Frankly, the picture looked like the top of one of my book shelves, smooth and flat but covered in zillions of specks of dust - as the 'Memsahib' keeps reminding me!  If you could view just that image with the naked eye it would be just a tiny segment of the black sky at night.

Each black dot in the image is a galaxy containing a hundred billion suns similar to ours.  In the past few years it has been observed that the majority of these suns are orbited by planets.  There are therefore in the universe thousands of billions of billions of billions of planets such as earth. [My emphasis]

Do you know, when I read that, all of a sudden I couldn't give a flying fig for the EU referendum, or anything much else, really!  I am tempted, God help me, to quote that keen political philosopher, Hillary Clinton, and say, "what difference at this point does it make?”  Or even worse, I might dwell on Shakespeare's bleak summary of the futility of life and mutter, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport". But, of course, that sort of fatalism is not only fatal but useless.  We are what we are, and that means we are trapped in this galvanising existence ordained to struggle and shake our puny fists at ... well ... what, exactly?

Oh dear, glup-glup-glup . . .

 

 

And now I bring thee even better news!

Honestly, I don't know why I sit here day after day 'working my fs to the bs' as I tap my way round this internet-thingie to find you good news to start your day.  I have already provided you with a naked female cast playing The Tempest so it's a tough job coming up with something better than that.  However, as you all know, D&N is the blog that keeps on giving!  So, now let me tell you about the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the biggest - and I do mean the BIGGEST - solar plant in the world.

It just caught fire!

And the fire was caused by one of its mirrors!

Oh, stop it!  You're making me laugh all over again and my keyboard almost blew a fuse with the tears dripping from my face!

According to the report at Popular Science, the frightfully brainy types who designed it all misaligned some of the mirrors which concentrated the heat of the sun in the wrong place.  All this reminds me of an equally funny story concerning a high-tech and equally 'Greenie' building owned by [cr]Apple where the solar panels in the roof caught fire,  According to the pv-Tech site, "[cr]Apple shifted the building’s purpose into that of a data centre, touting its green credentials."

Cue: hysterical laughter from deepest, darkest 'Zummerzet'!

 

Every so often even I am right

I can't remember how long ago it was that I warned 'Dim Dave' that all those squillions of quid he is spending on French-built(?) aircraft carriers could go down in history as the biggest waste of time, money and effort since, er, well, whatever was the last big spend by his daft government.  I warned that small, mobile, robot, weapon platforms would soon put aircraft carriers our of business.  This from the Stars and Stripes site:

The military is starting tests on the world's largest unmanned surface vessel — a self-driving, 132-foot ship designed to travel thousands of miles out at sea without a single crew member on board.

The so-called "Sea Hunter" has the potential to revolutionize not only the military's maritime operations but commercial shipping, according to military officials. If successful, it could usher in the arrival of unmanned cargo vessels moving between countries.

Sorry, Prime Minister, but the world has moved on since you were taught our glorious naval history at Eton!

 

In which Duff & Nonsense almost becomes Duff & Wisdom

Yeeeeees, I know, hard to swallow that title without choking but the, er, 'wisdom' contained on this site only becomes clear when you compare it to what passes for wisdom amongst members of the academy.  For example, take a deep breath and try reading this:

Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal—of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual . . .

The grammarians amongst you, of course, will have spotted that all of that was just a single sentence, or to be precise, part of a single sentence although only God and the original writer know for sure how long it went on.  It was written by the late Professor Roy Bhaskar, founder of the movement known as “Critical Realism.”  No doubt Prof. Bhaskar went to his grave proud of the fact that in 1996 he was the winner of The Bad Writing contest instituted by the late and very great, Dennis Dutton, the founder of what remains my favourite web site Arts & Letters Daily in which essays and articles on all sorts of subjects from a huge variety of magazines and scientific publications are highlighted.

The particular article that took my attention this morning comes from The New Criterion and is headlined "Glaciers and Sex".  It is a litany, although not an exhaustive one, of the utter tripe and balderdash produced by self-styled intellectuals inhabiting, often at our expense, the ivory towers of academe.  The title comes from a recent paper produced by Mark Carey, a dean and professor of history at the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon but before you read an excerpt please pause and offer a prayer on behalf of the tax-payers of Oregon who pay this chump and his cohorts for producing this landfill contribution entitled “Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”  Yeeeees, quite!

To provide you with a flavour of the piece - and I would remind you that spitting is very rude! - here are some excerpts:

“A critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers.” 

“While there has been relatively little research on gender and global environmental change in general, there is even less from a feminist perspective that focuses on gender . . . and also on power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology.”

“Feminist theories and critical epistemologies - especially feminist political ecology and feminist postcolonial science studies—open up new perspectives and analyses of the history of glaciological knowledge.”

“Given the prominent place of glaciers both within the social imaginary of climate change and in global environmental change research, a feminist approach has important present-day relevance for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and ice”.

Are you still with me? Good, because Prof. Carey and his co-authors intend to:

“decipher how gender affects the individuals producing glacier-related knowledges,”

“to analyze how power, domination, colonialism [Eh? What?] and control—undergirded by and coincident with masculinist ideologies—have shaped glacier-related sciences,” etc.

"Colonialism"!  Now look here, I know the British Empire is responsible for almost all the ills in this world because that is what the world keeps on and on telling us, but we never mistreated any glaciers as far as I know!  Anyway, I am deeply grateful to The New Criterion (I may well take out a subscription) for reminding me of the well-known fact that that there is no fool like a well-educated fool!

 

In which I throw myself on the intellects of my readers

As my regulars will know, I am not a man short of opinions.  Of course, I acknowledge that the quality of those opinions is, er, mixed - and that's putting it politely!  However, it is rare for a subject to arise about which, frankly, I am stumped for an opinion but, of course, 'The Speccie' - who else? - has done just that.  The editor, Mr. Fraser Nelson, has written an article warning us all that the monster we thought had been finally slain in a Berlin bunker in 1945 has risen from the dead.  He also reminds us, to our intense embarrassment, that the genesis for this monster was not Nazi Germany but liberal Britain!  This particular monster comes under the heading of a single word - eugenics.

He reminds us that one of the prime movers for the eugenics movement was Francis Galton, the cousin, no less, of Charles Darwin.  Mr. Nelson goes even further by quoting from a 1912 edition of the very Spectator magazine which he now edits:

The only way of cutting off the constant stream of idiots and imbeciles and feeble-minded persons who help to fill our prisons and workhouses, reformatories, and asylums is to prevent those who are known to be mentally defective from producing offspring. Undoubtedly the best way of doing this is to place these defectives under control. Even if this were a hardship to the individual it would be necessary for the sake of protecting the race.

And he reminds us that at the time many of 'the Great and the Good' were in support of this notion including Winston Churchill.  In 1908:

[A] Royal Commission conveyed the grave news that there were 150,000 ‘feeble-minded’ people in Britain. So what was to be done with them? As one reformer put it: “They must be acknowledged dependents of the State…but with complete and permanent loss of all civil rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood”. This was William Beveridge, founder of the welfare state. [My emphasis]

So what, you might grumble, that's all history!  Not according to Mr. Nelson who reports that via the wonders(!) of modern genetic science, eugenics is very much back in favour.

In academia, the word ‘eugenics’ may be controversial but the idea is not. To Professor Julian Savulescu, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, the ability to apply ‘rational design’ to humanity, through gene editing, offers a chance to improve the human stock — one baby at a time. ‘When it comes to screening out personality flaws such as potential alcoholism, psychopathy and disposition to violence,’ he said a while ago, ‘you could argue that people have a moral obligation to select ethically better children’.

It is difficult to oppose a science that will, by the use of genetic modifications, eradicate inheritable diseases and flaws. No-one dies, no-one is sterilised, no-one is aborted so what's not to like?  I'm not sure - but I don't like it!  But as a Brit, I need to make up my mind because one of the prime-movers in this new science(!) is the Francis Crick Institute in London, currently being built with government money, or my money as I fondly think of it!

The Francis Crick Institute says its gene-editing research has nothing to do with eugenics; even British law prohibits pregnancies from gene-edited embryos, and its researchers plan to destroy them after seven days. Instead, it aims to learn about the role of genes in miscarriage. But if its research improves gene-editing technology, less scrupulous scientists can make use of that. This is why scholars like Robert Pollack, a professor at Columbia University, want a moratorium on the whole process of modifying human genes. ‘Imagine that, many years hence, there are two sorts of people: those who carry the messy inheritance of their ancestors, and those whose ancestors had the resources to clean up their germ cells before IVF.’ So you end up with two types of humans: the genetically tidy rich and everyone else.

Now as I intimated at the beginning of this post, my instant re-action is to recoil in horror but I am all too aware that I have never thought through the implications, for good or ill, of this new science and where it might lead us all.  So, over to you  . . .

Perhaps, just perhaps, 'The Donald' wasn't entirely wrong

Sorry I'm a bit late today but it has been the first day of Spring.  No, not the 'official' first day but the sun was shining from a cloudless sky and as far as I am concerned that's all it takes!  Anyway, it necessitated a morning visit to the garden centre where I spent most of the time walking round in circles trying to remember the difference between a rose and a dandelion - yeeeeeees, quite - not much of a gardener, me!  Also, of course, the 'Memsahib' was commanding and reminding me that we're still not into April and that there could be a string of heavy frosts which would blight my 'babies' before they had even produced buds.  However, I am a man for the moment and long experience has taught me that my interest in gardens is usually somewhere between nil and -1 and thus it is essential that I seize the moment when a rare, very rare, enthusiasm arises.

All of that is by the way because 'The Donald' is - again! - all over the news because of his injudicious remarks concerning women having abortions and his opinion that they, or the medics concerned, should be punished.  Now, as the current saying has it, 'I have some skin in this game' being as I am a bastard by birth - as well as by nature!  Fortunately, my mother indulged her naughtiness in a time when abortion was a criminal offence.  Women may not have been punished but abortionists were.  Anyway, I lived, and just think what a huge loss to the world it would have been if I had been dragged out, no doubt kicking and screaming, and dumped in a waste bin - sorry, I didn't quite catch your remark!

However, it isn't just self-interest which prompts me to take a hard line against abortion.  I think human life, and I mean all human life, is precious and that before bringing it to an untimely end enormous care and thought needs to be applied.  I also think that human life begins the very instant sperm meets egg.  Life is a process and once started there is no difference in the value of a life at any particular moment along the journey.  It doesn't make any difference to me whether the life is terminated after one week of gestation or twenty weeks or any particular time span.  Efforts by the pro-abortion lobby to support this or that arbitrary time span, suggesting by inference that at a certain time an embolism is non-human and thus disposable and the next day is human and entitled to protection is ludicrous, at least, it is ludicrous until such time that they can specify with scientific rigor a particular characteristic which will define the condition with accuracy.

Now of course, this being a human affair, nothing is entirely clear and straightforward.  Instances of a child being produced following rape or a child suffering with gross deformities do not fall easily into an obvious solution.  Before decisions are made they need careful consideration.  The problem today is that mostly what we get in any abortion situation is careless consideration, in fact, I suspect, in the vast majority of cases there is no consideration at all! 

Happily, tomorrow I shall be out virtually all day and thus I will avoid the ton of brown stuff likely to fall on this blog as a result of this post.

 

£500,000! Is that all?

You know, that Stoppard fella's a proper education, so he is!  Amongst the many brilliant plays that Tom Stoppard has written there is an absolute gold mine of information on an enormous range of scientific and philosophical subjects and he slips them in so easily you can just swallow them whole.  For example, Fermat's Last Theorem - yeeeeees, quite!

Let us start at the beginning.  Pierre de Fermat was a massive, 17th century maths swot of the first order.  Amongst many other great insights he offered the following theorem based on the one by Pythagoras that you all learned at 'skool' - er, you did learn it didn't you?  You know, the one about right angled triangles where the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the other two sides.  This, in 'maths-speak', is usually written thus:

a² + b² = c²

Now that works alright so long as the multiplier is no bigger than 2.  Anything bigger than that and it fails and it will always fail and Pierre 'cleverclogs' Fermat proved it but, alas and quelle domage, as he scribbled in one of his notebooks, he lacked the space to write it out!  Cue several centuries of sweat and swearing by sundry maths swots desperate to find Fermat's proof.  In recent years several institutes of high learning have offered prize money to anyone who could offer such a proof.  At this point, enter Prof. Sir Andrew Wiles, currently at Oxford University, who, according to The Telegraph, has been awarded £500,000 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for having done so.  Frankly, I think he deserves double that!

Originally I came across this abstruse subject via the good, no, the brilliant mind of Sir Tom Stoppard and his play Arcadia which, if you have not seen, then you must - and that's an order! 

It's 'MacFungus' who's to blame!

Typical!  I should have guessed it but if you have ever wondered who was to blame for the development of Mankind on this benighted planet, blame the Jocks!  Oh yes (or perhaps I mean 'och aye'), some Cambridge biology swot has discovered the 'Clan Tortotubus' according to The Telegraph.  To be precise, Tortotubus isn't actually a clan, or even a human being, it's actually a bit of rotten fungus which developed some 440 million years ago, remains of which are to be found in 'Jockland'.  Apparently, it was the first living thing to crawl out from the sea and establish itself on land where it had the good manners to die and then rot and thus to provide the basis of fertile soil in which other living things would eventually develop.

According to The Telegraph story:

Examples of the diminutive Tortotubus fungus - shorter than the width of a human hair - were discovered on the Scottish Inner Hebridean island of Kerrera, and in Gotland, Sweden by scientists from the University of Cambridge.

It has the ring of truth about it because my old Ma, as Scottish as a haggis, always warned me that whilst Jocks might be diminutive, you could never quite knock them down and out!

I look forward to Jimmy Glesga's commentary on this fascinating news item!

Er, well, you see, somehow, it's all to do with, um, iterated algorithms

Now look here, all of you, I want to make it quite clear that I will not take any questions on this subject, because, er, well, in a very deep and fundamental way, I haven't a clue what I'm on about - and I heard that - who said "no change there then"?  I have confessed before that at school I failed all exams on 'sums', as I called it, because mathematics was quite beyond me.  I'm not proud of the idleness that has led to my ignorance, in fact, I'm totally pissed off by it because these days I really wish that I understood it.

There is no doubt that maths is the absolute key to fundamental knowledge.  The other day I watched a programme on the Scottish scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, who deserves a place on the plinth occupied by Newton and Einstein.  Amongst many other lines of investigation, he took the Faraday's developing ideas on electricity and magnetism and combined them into one overriding theory of electro-magnetism and force fields - and he did it all by mathematics!  It was yet another example that at the very base of all scientific knowledge lies pure mathematics.

Another example of this can be found in the nature of evolution.  If you look at the seemingly wild, chaotic state of nature it is hard to accept that beneath it all hard, rigorous mathematics is at work.  This comes in the form of 'iterated algorithms' which, put simply and probably not absolutely accurately (because it's me!), is a method in which a certain mathematical instruction is endlessly repeated and as each step is completed the result is fed into the next step.  The results can be jaw-dropping

Before iterating


Iteration #1


Iteration #2


Iteration #3


Iteration #4


Iteration #5


Iteration #6


Iteration #7


Iteration #8


Iteration #9


Iteration #10

The results of these constant feed-back iterations are known as fractals.  If you go to this site: 

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ergreen/honors_thesis/IFS.html

you can see animated diagrams of these constant iterations which lead to such amazing and unimagined results. 

In essence, natural evolution is simply an iterated algorithm in which genetic codes  are constantly iterated as each living thing either seeds itself or mates with another and thus sustains the breed.  However, in nature, just as in repetitive machine codes produced by computers, mistakes happen and when they are iterated a few zillion times, lo, a completely new life form is produced.

The 'uber'- Darwinists, like 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins, insist that new species are formed by tiny incremental changes which are subject to pressures from the outside world and very, very gradually transform into new species if, and only if, they prove to be successful.  The development of the eye is one favourite example but there have been some maths swots who have proved that such a sophisticated development would have taken longer than the existence of the world to reach its sophisticated state by means of tiny incremental improvements.

The theory put forward by the likes of Richard J. Bird in his two books is that the chains of DNA which come together in the act of reproduction is, in fact, an iterated chemical algorithm and whilst zillions of such repetitions will occur with little variation, from time there will be a massive jump-change which, if successful in the real world, will lead to the formation of different species. 

Richard Bird's first book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chaos-Life-Complexity-Evolution-Thought/dp/023112662X

And his second, just published: 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B6OO4N2?ref_=pe_2427780_160035660

 

Government Health Warning: Do not take my summary of his erudite books as an accurate explanation because I'm as thick as a plank!