Monthly Archives: July 2009

Summer camp

Posted on by

In case you missed this story, there’s an atheist summer camp for kids in the UK, based on an American model (Camp Quest) inevitably.

I admit the idea is mildly ridiculous – devising improving leisure activities for kids, like po-faced Victorian philanthropists.

However, this has got to be an infinitely better idea than the summer camps that try to teach religion along with the raft-building and tree-climbing. This camp aims to encourage critical thinking and offers a prize for doing it, in the form of a £10 note autographed by Richard Dawkins.

So, if you are parent who’s already dreaming of a few child-free summer days – or if you are a kid who wants to go camping and to disprove the existence of unicorns away from your parents – it might be well worth checking it out.

While the cat’s away

Posted on by

Ben Goldacre seems to be on holiday. (His most recent post on badscience.net was dated 18 July.) The temporary absence of the scourge of pseudo-science may have given the green light to new levels of absurdity.

The Times Science Editor, no less, wrote that

Women are getting more beautiful
FOR the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.
The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern

Now, being in the female half of the population, I’m not showing a satisfied smile. In fact, he only physical expression that you could detect me making would be the Sign language sign for “bullshit”, which a QI repeat showed last week.

(Arms crossed on your chest, with the fingers of one hand making horns and the fingers of the other hand opening and closing as if to drop a load. How beautifully expressive is that?)

If I knew the Sign Language for “ideological and sexist bullshit”, I’d be putting that here instead. But I bet even Steven Fry doesn’t know that one.

“Beautiful” women have more children? Can anyone pretend for one second that there is an objective standard for beauty? Ideals of beauty vary enormously over time and between cultures. Indeed,you wouldn’t find agreement on a common standard between people living a few miles apart. (Certainly not in the city where I live.)

And “having more children”, nay even, having more female children? WTF. That might have been a sign of evolutionary success in the paleolithic, but would surely have depended much more on the capacity to raise children to adulthood than to breed them even then. In modern societies, having a smaller number of offspring is pretty well directly associated with higher levels of education, health and wealth, at the household level, and with economic development, at the social level.

To follow the “logic” of this argument, uglier women would be more reproductively successful in modern society, then, surely?

Quite apart from anything else – because I’m bored with pointing out blatant absurdities in this report – just look around. Opening your eyes on any public street will soon put paid to any idea that good-looking people reproduce more than homely people.

This is the nub of the science bit:

In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had.

Hmm, that sounds sciencey but, just having numbers in doesn’t make it science. (Pause to remember that “up to 16%” more children can include anything from fewer children right up to 16% more. )

I can’t find this study online, although there are plenty of newmedia refernces to it. The only works I can find with the name of Markus Jokela are apparently legit: a study of childhood risk in the the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and a study of IQ, Socioeconomic Status and Early Death: The US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in Psychosomatic Medicine.

I’m pretty tempted to let Dr Jokela off the hook here and suggest that the whole beautiful women reproduce more “study” is an obscure internet jokela. One can but hope.

In any case, Ben Goldacre, please stop sunning yourself, and sort this nonsense out.

Media management for dummies

Posted on by

Exhaustive scientific research has now shown that PR people can be replaced by a simple formula. The research indicates that you can always make the national news by inserting a few simple words in any story.

Just combine at least one word from group A with one or more from any other group.

Now go away and form your own PR agency.

Group A – Racing certainties

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Knife crime
  • Health scares and/or Miracle cures
  • Harry Potter
  • Asylum seekers
  • Political correctness (preferably “gone mad”, naturally)

Group B – Floaters
Temporary certainties but time-limited:

  • Michael Jackson
  • Joanna Lumley
  • Swine flu

Group C – Old news
These may not always work, but could come through for you on a slow news day:

  • Gun crime
  • Mobile phones
  • Terrorism
  • Texting
  • McCanns
  • Islamic fundamentalism
  • Christians not allowed to wear promise rings/crosses
  • Princess Diana

Group D – Fillers

  • Richard Dawkins
  • The Pope/Archbishop of Canterbury/Bishop Sentamu
  • Jordan/Paris Hilton/Amy Winehouse/Lily Allen et al
  • Simon Cowell
  • Teenagers’/women’s binge drinking
  • Fatness/thinness/bulimia/anorexia
  • Big Brother/X-factor/Britain’s got Talent/Dragons Den/The Apprentice/I’m a Celebrity, yada yada

Now, as soon as I work out how to claim royalties on this, I’m set to make Max Clifford look like a gifted amateur.

They steal your soul

Posted on by

Police in Greater Manchester have been walking around with hand-held cameras filming parolees and “people they don’t like the look of” with the intention of putting video footage on Youtube.

How beautifully ironic that police in some parts of the country are arresting and dearresting people carrying cameras with intent to capture images, while their colleagues in other places are doing that exact thing as a supposedly powerful crime-fighting tool.

What is it about the magic of cameras? There is a probably mythological idea that certain tribes believed that photographs somehow stole your soul. Our society seems to hold to a contradictory belief that photographic images are at the same time both “terrifyingly dangerous” and “the solution to every social problem”. Which of these beliefs is the most obviously irrational? (Rhetorical question)

This reminds me of a post on the Register that showed pictures of Google Street View vehicles, taken by the people who were themselves featured on Google Street View taking the pictures on the Register. The Register suggested that

Surveillance feedback loops threaten fabric of time and space

Ties that bind

Posted on by

Few items of men’s clothing are as silly as ties. They don’t keep your neck warm or work as an effective bib. They would hardly be anyone’s first choice for a weapon, unless they were reinforced with metal wire to fashion a more effective garrote. Although conveniently sited for would-be suicides, they probably wouldn’t even let the wearer achieve effective self-strangulation. Any man in his right mind would choose to go tie-less whenever he can get away with it.

Their only purpose is to signify meaning: masculinity, formality, group membership, conformity to dress codes, higher status.

But, clip-on ties are even worse than real ties. They are neck ornaments that express the concept of humiliation in a polyester format.

They make the wearer look a bit simple-minded: too clumsy to wrap a bit of cloth round itself and thread one end through the loop; too aesthetically challenged to notice what they are wearing exudes ugliness; and too stupid to realise that nobody thinks you are wearing
a real tie just because there’s an ersatz tie front clipped under your adam’s apple.

So, as insignificant as this was as a BBC news item (only “news” because of the media’s strange belief that mention of Facebook or texting will make any story seem totally up-to-date), I can actually understand why school students would campaign against the replacement of real ties by clip-on travesties.

Two odd explanations are put forward: safety issues and preventing self-expression through the medium of the tie knot.

Schools across the UK are said to be switching ties over safety fears……
In May the Schoolwear Association, the trade body for the school uniform industry, said 10 schools a week in the UK were switching, because of fears of ties getting caught in equipment or strangling pupils.
The association also said that clip-on ties can stop pupils from customising the size of the knots in their ties.

Both these arguments are ridiculous.

This bizarre idea that modding your school uniform is anti-education was also held at my school – usually by the teachers with the lowest capacity to engage the students in learning. If there really were any connection between students’ conformity to a randomly-assigned dress code and their capacity to develop their minds, postgraduates students would be wearing uniforms. Surely it would be more important for PhD students to get the brain-boosting power of the dress code?

The health and safety argument is also bizarre. A tie caught in a bunsen burner or lathe would be dangerous. Doesn’t that suggest that boys should take off their ties in the lab or machine shop? If they are still in danger of accidental or deliberate strangulation in the playground, shouldn’t schools just dispense with the stupid garments altogether? Rather than replace them with even more ludicrous alternatives?

These arguments have been trotted out a few times this year, for instance by the Schoolwear Association who did a “survey” that found that 10 schools a week were switching to clip-on ties on the grounds of safety. And also because of the worry that some pupils might be knotting their ties in dangerously non-standard ways – obviously imperceptible to the likes of me, who assumed that all tie-knots were pretty much of a muchness.

Here’s a BBC story about one such school

School bans ‘unsafe’ knotted ties
Children not wearing clip-on ties will be sent home
A school in Greater Manchester has banned its pupils from wearing knotted ties because it says they could pose a safety risk.

That school head claimed that:

“Obviously there is a health and safety element.
“Pupils can take precautions during technical lessons where there is machinery, but it is the unexpected factors such as running and having their ties pulled that could be a problem.
“We also feel it is smarter because older children will not wear the ties in a casual way. This is in line with places like Marks and Spencer, the police and the armed forces.”

**Pause to chortle at the idea of the army and police issuing regulation clip-on ties. Although it might certainly add a welcome tension-diffusing dimension to arrests, if the arrestees suddenly spotted that he or she was being detained by someone wearing a comedy tie.**

Not to mention, these silly arguments just give aid and comfort to the “political correctness gone mad” buffoons who never miss a platform to mouth off in the media. As in this classic quote that would score two out of two in a miniature game of bigot bingo.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said the decision was inexplicable.
“It seems like another instance of political correctness and health and safety gone mad. (from the BBC report in May)

Ugly word, ugly actions

Posted on by

A photographer was arrested for taking photographs in Kent – and apparently also for being tallish in a public place (according the Register, although this bit of the story may be apocryphal). Well, being tallish seems safer than looking a bit Brazilian.

Medway Eyes has links to several magazines and newspapers that discuss this infuriating story. (Eg, Henry Porter in the Guardian.)

The wrongness of this incident is self-evident. (For instance, let’s start with the misuse of anti-terror laws to harass people or with the de facto imposition of a requirement to show ID…..)

However, I’m getting soooo tired about banging on about the loss of civil liberties that I won’t bother here. Please take it as read.

Instead, I’m just going to whine about the word “de-arrested” According to Amateur Photography:

A spokesman for Kent Police confirmed this morning: ‘We can confirm that on Wednesday 8 July, at approximately 12.30pm, a man was arrested on Military Road, Chatham. After a short period of time the man was dearrested and no further action will be taken.’

“Dearrested”. It’s not a word.

I’m all for making up words on spec but surely any inventions should add something to the English language, not just make speech uglier, to no purpose.

What’s wrong with “freed”? Maybe “freed” was rejected because it carries a subliminal association with the concept of “freedom,” whereas “dearrested” just reminds you of “arrest.”

There’s a subtle suggestion that the condition of being arrested is the default state, with “dearrest” (sic, not “dearest”, please try to keep up) being the anomaly.

Obviously, being “dearrested” is infinitely preferable to being arrested. But, then, who’d have thought – ten years ago – that using your own camera in a public shopping street could lead to you getting arrested in the first place?

On 9th July, the Metropolitan Police issued guidelines to its police officers to point out that taking photographs was not a crime, but apparently the Home Office was not altogether behind that seemingly innocuous message. And it certainly doesn’t seem to have filtered through to the Medway towns.

In any case, if taking photographs is somehow a crime, how can anyone square that with the ubiquity of CCTV in Britain? There must be scarcely more than ten feet of public space that isn’t being photographed on a 24-hour -a-day basis. The Register pointed out a truly amazing statistic:

As if to underline Britain’s status as the West’s most monitored society, the BBC’s Freedom of Information requests showed that authorities on the Shetland Islands have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department.

At last a use for the internet

Posted on by

Shakespeare’s Henry V was a “history play”. At the time the play was written, the events it showed were already over a hundred and fifty years in the past.

Now, anyone with access to the web can go one better than Shakespeare, whose detailed knowledge of the period must have been a bit limited (Well, OK, you can only better Shakespeare in certain specified ways. Nobody’s managed to get the monkeys to tap out the Complete Works yet. )

You can find out the names and jobs of the individual men in Henry V’s armies just by searching on The Soldier in Later Medieval England databases. Plus, you can learn any number of other details about medieval soldiers – such as the archers in the Earl of Arundel’s service.

There are now 250,000 medieval service records online, in a pilot project covering the period from 1369 to 1453.

You can have hours of history nerd fun with this, such as trying to guess which were the most common late medieval peasant surnames.

(Smiths are pretty rare, for instance, although maybe my search-criteron spelling was too specific. There are a mere half a dozen Taylors. Even FitzWilliams seem to greatly outnumber Smiths. There are many more chaps with the Archer surname, suggesting a possible failure of imagination by the clerks who kept these records.)

People with a less frivolous interest in local or family history can search on surnames or dates or leaders and extend their knowledge, rather than their enjoyment of trivia.

There are bits of the database that I can’t work out what to do with, especially the column labelled membrane which has entries like “m4d”

According to the BBC

The website is the product of a research project by Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton and Dr Adrian Bell of the University of Reading.

Bravo, respect to them and everyone who worked on it.

Failure to grasp the point

Posted on by

Truly, the world is a pendulum. A great post on Why Evolution is True about the vestigial grasp observed in human infants was countered by a silly post on Uncommon Descent.

WEIT discussed how the instinctive grasping reflex observed in newborn babies can best be interpreted as a relic of behaviour in pre-hominids (new-born babies hanging on to their mothers)

This is not a revolutionary new idea. I am amazed that it is even contentious. This was accepted wisdom in the UK several years ago.

O’Reilly’s counter starts from the position of apparently never having heard of the idea that “anecdote is not evidence”.

When my first child was very young, she had a habit of grasping my hair while feeding. My hair was long at that time.
It seemed to please and comfort her.

(Can I be the only person who sees it as a commentary on O’Reilly’s attitude to her offspring that – believing pleasure and comfort to be the only reason for the baby’s hair-grasping – O’Reilly immediately got her hair cut? )

However, grasping has many uses for a human infant – it is the principle [sic – a pedant] way the infant contacts reality (unfortunately by attempting to put things in its mouth), that being the only sense that is even moderately well developed.

This sentence is too ambiguous to follow. She seems to have meant to put the end of the sentence in the bracket, so I’ll ignore the bit about taste.

We are left with grasping being described as the main way in which an infant contacts reality. What? Does this make any sense?

In case you can’t answer that rhetorical question, let me answer it for you. “No.”

So what? Well, this Uncommon Descent post was O’Reilly’s “answer” to:

Incidentally, what do the ID and the Evolution-is-limited-in-scope (Behe, et all) do with data like this:

“Mouth random words” is what they do, apparently.

Oh, and betray that they implicitly acknowledge the role of evolution 🙂 :

However, I also suspect that it has been a long time since any such skill as hanging on to mother was needed.

A long time? As in “the sort of time scales and species changes that evolution would predict”?

By toutatis!

Posted on by

Enticing as this BBC story is – Pagan Police Get Solstice Leave, as so often, the content doesn’t live up to the hype.

Pagan police officers in some areas are being allowed to take as many as eight days leave a year for events such as the summer solstice and Halloween.
It comes after the Pagan Police Association was set up following discussions with Home Office officials.

Just in case you are a police officer reading this and you think can see hitherto-unsuspected benefits resulting from a quick faith change – of the kind that so many people undergo when their children reach school age – there aren’t actually any extra holiday opportunities for pagan police.

You would only get to swap your standard bank holidays for pagan bank holidays.

Which is a pity, because I was wondering if the “extra leave” principle might transfer to other jobs and other belief systems. Or at least, there’s a chance that non-believers could slip in under the pagan wire, given that a dictionary meaning of pagan is probably “non-christian”. I was wondering if even my employers could be persuaded to look sympathetically on my need to stay off work on Darwin days and Russell’s Birthday celebrations.

However, although you don’t get any more holidays, don’t despair yet, pagan police officers, just move to Hertfordshire. The BBC says that it has appointed two – note that, not just one, but two – pagan police chaplains. How unutterably cool is that?

Holy water not holy enough

Posted on by

The miraculous properties of holy water don’t extend to disinfectant properties, it seems. From a Guardian article about swine flu:

Today, the Bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Reverend John Gladwin, advised his diocese to temporarily end the use of holy water for fear it could pass the virus through congregations. (from the Guardian, 14 July 2009)

Bug report, pig sick

Posted on by
Conspiracy theories from http://xkcd.com/258/

Conspiracy theories from http://xkcd.com/258/

In the spirit of this xkcd comic, I’d like to file a bug report on that section of the British public that Had its Say to the BBC on the swine flu epidemic.

You could basically construct almost any one of these farts-in-email format by perming any 3 items from the following list:

  • It was deliberately created in a military lab to cull the world’s population
  • It is a just media hype to sell papers
  • It is just a pharmaceutical industry hype to sell tamiflu
  • It is an imaginary disease dreamt up by the same media liberals who insist that climate change is a real danger.
  • Treatment is a waste of their precious public money
  • It’s just “flu” and, therefore, completely insignificant
  • It is completely out of control. (It’s actually possible to find this idea in the same email as the idea above)
  • I demand immediate access to the (so far purely conceptual) vaccination
  • The (so far purely conceptual) vaccination is poisonous and I refuse to take it.
  • The government has invented the epidemic to distract us from….

This example is a representative classic, in its mixture of selfishness, poor grasp of the English language and anti-labour government ranting.

I suppose we the Tax payer will be paying for the expensive drugs, the additional medical staff and rubbish propoganda material published by good old Gordo and his quango’s

Hmm, these HYS-armchair-generals-turned-medical-experts make me feel pig sick. Even if I didn’t have swine flu, which I apparently do.

Weird security

Posted on by

Bruce Shneier’s blog discusses how to secure your laptop at international borders. Ignoring the fact that the Shneier methods are impressively ingenious – although, surely, in the sledgehammer-nut category – the truly amazing thing is that any government thinks “security” is served by searching laptops at airports.

I don’t mean “searched to make sure that they aren’t hiding bombs or weapons”. That would be a completely reasonable kind of search.

No, I mean searched, in the sense of “searching the hard drive.” This is absurd, in purely practical terms – ignoring the civil liberties questions – on so many levels. (I planned to list the practical difficulties of the idea, but they should be obvious to anyone who’s ever trawled their own hard disks for hours, in a quest for a two years old cv.)

The gaping elephant-in-the-room sized flaw in the whole procedure is the INTERNET. Any given piece-of-dangerous-information can be sitting comfortably on a computer in end-country x, hours before a courier-with-the-laptop has driven to an international airport in origin-country y. So, why the laptop searches?

A miracle for E-Bay

Posted on by

A piece of toast has miraculously appeared on a wikipedia image of Jesus.

miraculous appearnce of toast

miraculous appearnce of toast

Michael Jackson’s face in tree

Posted on by

Maybe not as edible as Jesus toast – but just as miraculous, hallelujah – the face of Michael Jackson appeared in somebody’s tree. There’s a photo on CNN. 🙂

Calling on the power of the Almighty Rorschach – may His name be praised – I can reveal that it’s REALLY a miraculous image of a cat/owl hybrid in the final stages of swallowing a skinny lizard.

CBS has a gallery of images of the saintly sightings discovered in fast food and household items. Each one is almost more convincing evidence of an all-powerful deity than the next – if that were possible.

Luckily, despite having been specifically singled out by their omnipotent god to receive these magical images, the people who get them often refuse to be selfish.

They choose to share them with the world. On E-bay.

************************
Added bit.

I just spotted a link to this great magical-item-generator on bengoldacre’s bookmarks

Giving bad science a bad name

Posted on by

“Coffee cures Alzheimer’s.” This sounds like great news for me personally, given that generally I drink enough coffee per day to wake up the population of a small town.

Am I drinking the right amount, though? How much do you need to drink to avoid – nay, cure – the dread disease?

The Independent claims that a modest cup a day will do it.

A coffee a day ensures the memory will stay

The BBC has a more demanding coffee-drinking schedule. And it’s a lot more tentative about the good it will do.

Coffee ‘may reverse Alzheimer’s’
A possible treatment for dementia?
Drinking five cups of coffee a day could reverse memory problems seen in Alzheimer’s disease, US scientists say.

Wait, a mere two cups of coffee might do it.

The mice were given the equivalent of five 8 oz (227 grams) cups of coffee a day – about 500 milligrams of caffeine.
The researchers say this is the same as is found in two cups of “specialty” coffees such as lattes or cappuccinos from coffee shops, 14 cups of tea, or 20 soft drinks.

It may be too pedantic to point out that a latte or cappuccino are defined by the milk, rather than by the caffeine content. I take it they are using these as shorthand for “real” rather than instant coffee. Ground coffee or espresso may just be too unfashionable to mention.

The Daily Express actually led with this news item covering its front page, in some print editions. It thinks two coffees is the magic quantity.

TWO CUPS OF COFFEE A DAY STOPS ALZHEIMER’S
DRINKING two cups of coffee a day reverses the effects of Alzheimer’s, ground-breaking research has revealed.
Scientists say powerful evidence shows caffeine not only helps to stave off the disease but can even treat it, as it helps to sharpen the memory.

This news item is a mite less groundbreaking than it appears. There was a similar story last year. The protective volume of coffee was one cup a day.

“This is the best evidence yet that caffeine equivalent to one cup of coffee a day can help protect the brain against cholesterol.

In that experiment, it was rabbits that got the caffeine. The poor buggers were killed, of course, but at least they they were just regular rabbits, as far as I can make out.*

Not so the mice. They were bred to have symptoms of Alzheimers. I am sure you will correct my neuroscience idiocy but – is that really the same as human beings having Alzheimers? Or so close to the same as dammit?

(I have serious doubts about the applicability of this research to humans. Serious enough to say that – in the astronomically unlikely event that I were ever on a university ethics committee – I’d have said to these experimenters “Not a chance. You haven’t justified doing the Frankenstein thing of breeding creatures to be sick, in this case. First try some epidemiological studies of people.”)

The interesting thing is that the research report itself doesn’t even claim that coffee cures Alzheimers.

Researchers in the US have shown that caffeine can boost memory in mice with Alzheimer’s symptoms.
At the moment it is not clear whether caffeine can have the same effect in people. Researchers are now carrying out trials to see if caffeine can be beneficial for people with Alzheimer’s.(from the Alzheimers Research Trust website)

However, a casual scan of a few news items would leave you thinking that you only need to force a few doppio espressos down the throats of your formerly caffeine-free older relatives and they could emerge brighteyed from dementia.

(* Another paper in the same journal reckoned that

Acetaminophen inhibits neuronal inflammation and protects neurons from oxidative stress

I think that’s paracetemol to us. I’ll start swallowing two with my morning latte.)