About Polly Unsaturate

A lady of leisure. Working interferes with my hobbies, so I dont do it.

European court 1 UK Home Office 0

Posted on Thu, 4 December, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The European Court of Human Rights (made up of 17 senior judges – 17, count them- from all over Europe) has ruled that the UK’s determination to keep hold of any DNA it can get its hands on is a breach of human rights.

The whole judgement is magisterially sweet, as reported by the BBC. It’s not on the EC Court of Human Rights’ site yet but you can see some of the details of the case there.

Otimo. Bravo. Wunderbar. Bellissimo. (I’ve run out of pan-European superlatives and have already stretched linguistic capacity too far for these to be exactly right. You get the idea anyway)

It’s a bit embarrassing that the UK has to rely on the House of Lords to throw out 42 detention plans or the European human rights court to challenge creeping authoritarian. But, as a country, we have become so pathetic that we need any help we can get.

God is at it again

Posted on Wed, 3 December, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The evil god who tells people to gun down complete strangers in crowded shopping malls is up to his old tricks. He ordered a man to ram a vehicle at 100mph.

” God told him “she needed to be taken off the road.”

This may not be a bad defence for someone living in a god fearing state. Google-maps shows Bexar County is in Texas, near San Antonio. On the basis of my admittedly non-existent knowledge of the distribution of blind faith in the USA, that sounds a mite too sceptical a location for this to play well as a defence strategy.

Still, there would only need to be a couple of Rapture Ready people on the jury and he’d walk from court a free man. After all, if god is going to beam them up and smash up the place after they’ve gone, who among them could say that this wasn’t a genuine manifestation of his smitely powers?

The prosecution could hardly prove the driver was acting under a ludicrous belief, “beyond reasonable doubt,” without implicitly calling into question all those Old Testament stories where god told people to sacrifice their first born or stone the ungodly.

Redirected Mail

Posted on Tue, 2 December, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Here’s another good reason for not reading the Daily Mail (if one were ever needed.) According to the Register:

Malware authors play Mario on Daily Mail website
Cue the outrage
An advertising network used by the Daily Mail website is being used to serve up malware. (By John Leyden in the Register )

Basically, one of its ad networks serves up redirection scripts, using Mario worm code.

Code injected into an advertising stream is been used to serve up content for a malware-harbouring website located in Russia (which we won’t name in case people are tempted to visit it). This site uses vulnerabilities in browser software to download malicious code onto unpatched Windows PCs, a classic drive-by-download attack.

I would be really laughing at this, were it not for the fact that this intrepid blog often looks at the online Mail, partly for amusement and partly to see what “information” so many people are getting fed. So the mocking laughter (a Nelsonesque “Ha Haa”) has got to be tempered by a self-recriminating “D’oh.” Then again, almost nothing would ever induce me to click on one of its ads, so I reckon it’s OK.

In any case, it’s quite hard to imagine a digital virus that could be anything like as devastating as the impact on British brain function that could be caused by reading the print version.

Not before time

Posted on Sun, 30 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Bin Laden’s driver may have helped bring about the Beginning of the end for Guantanemo, according to the BBC.

Well, this is a closure long overdue, to put it mildly. But the repercussions may take much longer to play themselves out. On the subject of the return of Yemeni citizens to their own countries,

..the US is concerned about Yemen’s ability to monitor and rehabilitate them.
Three of the seven men involved in an attack against the US embassy in Yemen in September were former Guantanamo detainees who had gone through the Yemeni rehabilitation programme. (from the BBC)

Hmm. The US government held these people, without trial, in torture conditions for years. I don’t think you can blame the Yemeni government for the ex-prisoners’ desire to harm the US.

This shows that Gitmo was effectively a terrorism training camp. At the very least, it will have massively boosted the will of former detainees to attack the USA. Beyond this, its very existence has boosted the ideological support for Islamic terrorism, in general

In the week of the horrific shootings in Mumbai, this seems a particularly stupid strategy.

6 things

Posted on Thu, 27 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Tagged by the Chaplain with the 6 things meme, the rules of which are:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random, arbitrary things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

After doing 1 and 2, I’ve gone straight to 4, already stumped by the problem of picking 6 blogs that won’t have already been tagged or won’t like it. But I obviously can’t do it at all without the dreaded 6 things. And I am pleased that the Chaplain has tagged me. Her blog is really good. She always says wise things in it and makes wise and funny comments here.

My problem is that – although I’m anything but humble – I really can’t think of 6 things about me that are both
(a) interesting and
(b) that I’d feel Ok about sticking on the internet.
(If I didn’t think feel like that, I’d have a MySpace or Facebook page, rather than a withering sense of disdain for almost anyone who has one when they aren’t trying to sell records.)

Killing 2 birds with one stone seemed the way to go. I’ll look at some blogs and if they have been tagged, I’ll respond to their content to make my 6 things. No, too much effort.

So I’m going to spew out a a stream of consciousness response and then stick in random numbers…..

Suppress instinctive yawn. The brain mists over at the words “stream of consciousness” Oh Loki forbid, am I going to talk about consciousness? Am I actively trying to discourage readers? (Might as well discuss French structuralist anthropology and have done with it. ) OK, there will be no more messing about with the concept of consciousness.

No, must make this at least marginally more entertaining. (Sadly, this week, I feel as witty as someone who’s just put in a long day’s work shovelling wit in the witmines and just can’t face dealing with emptying their own withouse.)

What are these memes for?

A few of the Good things are

Helping to create a community;
Getting a few more links and finding a few more blogs you might be interested in;
Getting to know each other better as real humans rather than representations of character strings a in pixel format;

Oh my void, it seems as if I’m going to write a list of Bad Things and turn this into some form of meme SWOT analysis*. Must put a stop to that now. Will skip straight to the Threats then:

Mapping social networking is a big growth area in the ongoing projects to map all our lives and connections. There seems something of a turkey willingly lining up for a Christmas cull in setting out all your social network connections in an easy to gather format. The instinctive rebel in me makes me think “Why make it easy for the buggers to draw up their endless connectedness maps? Let them at least do a bit of work.”

Too late. The instinctive conformist in me has already joined in the meme.

I like the thought of Good Thing number 3. If I find people interesting online, I do want to know more about the real human being.. But, I’m not often interested in what size gloves they were or the name of their first pet or who is their favourite musician. Apart from anything else, this can really put you off someone: Person’s X’s favourite tv programme is the X-Factor? Person Y’s favourite shirt colour is orange? Person Z believes Titanic was the best film ever made? How can I possibly have any respect for them?

Infinitely too superficial a basis on which to decide whether to assume someone is an idiot. But, I’ll do it. And I’m always trying to keep my superficiality in check. I’m already too superficial in real life. I decide how I feel about people on the basis of completely absurd judgements – mostly aesthetic. But, in the tangible world, I can see a lot more of someone. I can put (what I see as) the repellent stuff in context with the wonderful things about them. And they can do the same to me. (For example, they can decide whether having the most fantastic coat in the world makes up for being a really arrogant know-all or makes it even worse.)

Knowing someone only as from reading their blog is like meeting people in a speed-dating venue. They have a couple of minutes to impress you with their layout or humour or kindness or wisdom or intelligence or seriousness or recipe for shortbread or capacity to attract comment-acolytes or their grasp of web 2.0 standards in a *nix environment.

Noone would to turn up and tell you that they admire GW Bush as a peacemaker or that Elton John’s tribute to Princess Diana brings tears to their eyes. Because they’d quite rightly expect you to run a mile, or press the buzzer for the next one in line (I’m imagining it must be like speed chess but less fun. And I can’t play chess) If you discovered things like that, after you’ve got to know them and found out that they run a homeless shelter and are developing a cure for cancer, you might be a bit more forgiving.

So now, you know at least half a dozen random things about me. (1) I’ll sidestep anything I see as potentially intrusive. (2) I’m pretty superficial. (3) I’d rather talk about ideas or “people in general” than about actual people. (4) I can produce an opinion at the drop of a hat. (5) I’m probably pretty much like you in some ways and in some ways not at all like you. (6) I have now got a shit hot coat.

Tagged:
My first impulse is to tag the blogs that we always tag, like those in the WhyDontYou top ten but that seems lame. (And reminds me that the Top Ten needs some updating and expansion.) Most of them have been tagged anyway. (If you haven’t, please consider yourself tagged, if you’re in our top ten. Or, even if you aren’t.)

My next thought is to tag people whose blogs I don’t like at all, but that seems completely stupid. So I’m going to pick the names from blogs where I have no idea what to expect from the meme answers.

I am going to tag recent commenters here. Sadly, most of the recent unfamiliar names seem to be people without a blog link and tinned-industrial-meat-product blogs that slipped past Akismet, so I’ll skip them. (It’s too much of a challenge to credulity to believe that “Prefinished Flooring” or “Trauma Scene Clean up” or “Payday Loans” adopted those noms de blog as an obscure ironic joke.)

Here are some which are – pretty definitely – humans.

Dino Delellis
1 minion’s opinion (nice blog)
Atheist blogger
Ungodly cynic
K rad eleet
Mahalia

(Yes, I know i have to tell them now. Point 6)

* SWOT analysis: Monstrous grid of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is a compulsory part of any business plan. I don’t believe any funders or lenders ever read them, so you can probably list the names of your favourite or least favourite Star-Trek-spin-off characters.

Science of science standards

Posted on Wed, 26 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Abandon your moderate smugness about your academic skills and try to answer any of these old maths and chemistry exam questions:
Old mathematics paper
5 decades Chemistry papers

Well, I think I could get a few right, especially with a bit of a run-up to revise and some practice. But I would still have failed dismally. I couldn’t even get near to passing an exam that I’ve actually got the paper qualifications for – from the days when it was “harder”.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has petitioned the government about a fall in school science standards.

Armed with the first hard evidence of a catastrophic slippage in school science examinations standards, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has launched a Downing Street e-petition calling for urgent intervention to halt the slide.
And tomorrow morning a devastating RSC report demolishing the myth of record-breaking science education performance will land on the desks of all Members of Parliament.
The RSC report, also being supplied to industrialists and educationalists, raises major concerns over the disappearance from schools science examinations of vital problem-solving, critical thinking and mathematical manipulation…..
… Even bright students with enthusiastic teachers are being compelled to “learn to the test”, answering undemanding questions to satisfy the needs of league tables and national targets. The RSC has powerful evidence of the decline in standards, adding to the revelation that students are able to receive a “good pass” with a mark of 20%.

I’m not saying that they are wrong. They make very valid points in the report .

However, the public face of their “first hard evidence” seems more like a publicity stunt than science. In its pop-science media version, it certainly looks like the application of poor social science The RSC “hard evidence” is their exam test (5 decades Chemistry papers)

The RSC ran a competition based on exam questions culled from 50 years of chemistry O Level/GCSE exams. They found that the students (identified as “the most promising scientists” by their schools) who sat the tests “averaged just 25% of available marks.”

“Although the winner of the RSC competition got 94%, the fact that many highly intelligent youngsters were unfamiliar with solving these types of questions, obtaining on average 35% correct from recent papers from the 2000s and just 15% from the 1960s, points to a systemic failure and misplaced priorities in the educational system, rather than shortcomings in individual teachers or students. (From the RSC website)

Hmm. The content of the Chemistry curriculum has surely changed over 50 years. The percentage of correct answers fell as the questions went further back in time. This suggests at least one alternative explanation – the less familiar they were with the material, the worse the students did.

(Which is not surprising, given that teachers have had to “teach to the test” whenever they have prepared students for public exams. Students would be quite annoyed if they found themselves being prepared for exams from 50 years ago, because – however good their knowledge might be, it still wouldn’t allow them to do well on a 2008 paper.)

Surely, control samples should have been used. For instance, groups of students who weren’t already identified as the science stars; groups of students given only recent questions; groups of adults asked to sit the same tests and/ or recent exams. It would also have been more convincing if they hadn’t marked and set the tests themselves.

Not worth the bother? Obviously, because this would imply it was a real investigation, not a way to get their petition some public interest. (Such as I am showing here…. D’oh. Chemists:1 Me:0)

The RSC aren’t stupid. Their full report shows that they are aware that changes in the subject make it impossible to draw easy conclusions. They point out that they aren’t blaming teachers or students.

However, unless they are almost too unworldly to shop for their own pipettes, they would know that this will get publicity only because the whole report will be presented in terms of “exams are getting easier”.

This is an ongoing debate. It’s sometimes seen as a bit churlish to suggest that exams are easier, presenting some implied insult to the efforts of current students.

However, by very simple mathematics, if education policies are qualification-driven, demanding very high target levels of achievement, exam qualifications must get easier.

It is not possible to demand that 100% of 16 year-olds pass exams unless those exams are so easy that anyone can pass them (By definition. The clue’s in the target figure, for the mathematically-challenged.)

What teacher in their right mind would enter their dimmest or least interested students for a tough chemistry exam? Why would they encourage any students whom they think won’t get a good exam mark to develop an interest in science, when their school will go tumbling down the league tables if only 5% manage a pass?

The RSC is actually saying this. Their real argument is about the system not the easiness of exams.

But who’s going to notice that while we are all feeding our own prejudices about the youth of today getting dumber? (Try one of those exam papers if you ever start to believe that.)

A survey says

Posted on Mon, 24 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

There’s a news item – which seems to appear everywhere from the UK’s Daily Mail and the Telegraph to the Indian Andrha News – which suggests that 54% of British people believe in God, compared to 58% who believe in UFOs*, ghosts and mediums.

Internal Pedant wanted to change that last plural to “media” but that would have been both confusing and blatantly absurd. Surely, even UFOnauts and fundies aren’t stupid enough to place much faith in “the media”.

If only this were true……. Abduction survivors have a mild comedy value. People who consult psychics victimise only themselves. None of them are likely to start pogroms or crusades or jihads or even complain when people are insulting to their beliefs. So what does it matter?

Trying to draw a quick mental Venn diagram of the intersection of sets, I realise that the overlap between believing groups could be almost total. Between 4% and 54% of the respondents must believe in both God and UFOs.

These intersecting set people must have to spend so much of their time and mental energy in believing stuff that they might as well be channelling Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, who managed to cram in believing six impossible things before breakfast

But, all these news stories say something like “according to a survey”. However, I can’t find one report with any references to who carried out this survey, what the questions were, how many people were interviewed or any of those dull facts that Ben Goldacre keeps reminding us to think about when we see survey reports in the media.

Plus,

“The findings, maybe somewhat unsurprisingly, have been issued to mark the DVD release of The X-Files: I Want to Believe” (from the Daily Mail)

That’s why I can’t find any links to the actual survey. It’s a publicity stunt.

Silly me. That’s what you get for believing in the media…..

* Normally, this means believing that unidentified flying objects are all secret Grey visitors from the planet zarg who will beam up rednecks and probe their orifices. Still, I have to admit to my own inability to identify more than a handful of flying objects. I confused a jay with a pheasant only last week. I can recognise a Cessna and a Spitfire and a Hurricane (from childhood model-building experiments) but otherwise they are all just planes.

Moron Alert

Aside

Moron alert. Bah, it turns out to be me. I have had a few goes at uploading the Stewart Lee video. I think I’ve finally cracked it.

Stewart Lee, the Video

Posted on Sun, 23 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

A reference on PhillyChief’s blog reminded me about Stewart Lee and Jerry Springer, the Opera.

Stewart Lee is a comedian who became an arch-hate figure for Christian Voice a couple of years ago, because he was one of the writers of Jerry Springer the Opera. This was a tv programme that Christian Voice considered so inherently blasphemous that they tried to sue the BBC for broadcasting it. They were crowing on a channel Four documentary last year that they’d bankrupted the producers of the show, although I’m not sure if this has any basis in fact.

There are some really funny anti-Christian-Voice-blasphemy-complaint spiels in other Stewart Lee videos but I’ll post links to them at another time. This link isn’t to one of those, but I had to post it because of the irresistible Richard Littlejohn bit at the end.

Whenever I hear the phrase “Political correctness gone mad” I should reach for this video.

Stewart lee on political correctness gone mad

Parental Advisory: contains some extravagant and well-justified cussing 🙂

This blog is bigger than god

Posted on Sun, 23 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

In what must be one of the longest waits from confession to absolution on record, the Vatican has forgiven John Lennon for saying the Beatles were bigger than god (or more popular than Jesus, or something) according to the BBC.

This was a mildly jokey casual remark made in the early 1960s, by a man who’s been now dead for decades. Has the Catholic Church been fretting about it ever since?

The BBC has a 1960s clip that shows some of the aftermath of the Beatles’ bizarrely notorious jokes about their huge success in the USA.

In this clip, a reporter with an impeccable old-style “BBC” accent talks about US fundamentalist baptists with the barely disguised distaste of someone who’s spotted another guest eating a fly at a dinner party.

The implication is that the UK saw the extreme US responses to the Beatles’ remarks as symptomatic of a strange and backward American culture. Beatle atheism was more or less taken for granted in the UK. The tolerant attitude of UK religious believers is also taken for granted. The BBC reporter could clearly assume that even UK churchgoers would see US bonfires of Beatles merchandise as exotically bizarre.

This was 40 years ago.

You certainly can’t imagine science teachers thinking that Intelligent Design should have an equal billing with Evolution in the biology curriculum, forty years ago.

The world can’t be a sci-fi novel. If it were, the hero would surely have detected by now that time is running backwards.

When all else fails, blame the Internet

Posted on Mon, 17 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

On this morning’s bus journey, I read in what appears to be yesterday’s Metro, from the date on the Metro website version of this article, (although I can’t believe the Metros has a Sunday version.)

Web vengeance on Baby P couple
The identities of the mother and stepfather of Baby P have been posted on the internet – along with messages urging convicts to attack them.

The baby P story is a truly mind-numbing story, involving the torture and murder of a baby, at the hands of his mother, stepfather and the lodger. The child was listed by social services as being at risk, The police had already been involved and had sought a prosecution. No one seemed able to save the lad’s life. It’s one of those stories that push the boundaries of your capacity for rage.

The visual presentation of this story has been disturbing, even for those who can’t bring themselves to read the court statements. The police released a 3-d rendering of a baby’s head with a catalogue of injuries. The next day, the papers followed this up the image with pre-injury pictures of an angelic-looking little blonde boy.

Every one involved – which now means most of the UK population – has been looking to find someone or something to blame. The almost inconceivable stupidity of the social services staff seems a fair target. The government has set up an enquiry. A BBC Panorama programme tonight will investigate claims by police and a senior social worker that they recommended that the child be taken into care. (Hindsight is 20/20, as teh saying goes.)

But, the actual culprits have already been found guilty. The visceral response is to want to execute them. Of course, faced with these backward and depressed people, no doubt themselves abused as children, the quality of mercy would get the better of this instinct, for most people. After all, that’s why most of us are not murdering simpletons.

Understandably, many people expressed their natural fury on the Internet. Intemperately, yes. Still, it seems quite bizarre to see that now this means that the Internet has got to take the blame. As usual.

There was already a half-hearted attempt to blame the Internet in the trial reports when it was reported of the mother that

When she was awake, she spent much of her time on the internet, gossiping in chatrooms and playing online poker.

I am no fan of either moronic chatrooms or online gambling. But, I find it hard to draw any connections between either of these activities and child murder.

Similarly, I can’t see that venting rage on the Intenet is much of a crime either. The argument seems to be that internet rage is bad because it will find its expression in attacks on the guilty three.

Late last week Facebook shut down pages carrying threats and abusive comments about the mother, including one entitled: ‘Death is too good for [the mother’s name], torture the bitch that killed Baby P.’
Another was added yesterday and had been viewed by at least 6,000 people last night.
The mother’s profile page on Bebo was removed after abusive messages were added.
The postings demonstrate the ease with which the law can be breached online.

How odd that writing (richly deserved) insulting comments on a website can be a crime. Indeed, unless, the web access in x prison is much more generous than in my (non-custodial, though it sometimes feels otherwise) workplace, I don’t even see how the mother will get to read the comments.

I am most baffled by the idea that identifying these people and saying vicious things about them is somehow equivalent to instructing fellow prisoners to injure them. And that such orders – from people unknown – will be followed to the letter.

Are there people in jail who assume that behavioural instructions on the internet have the force of law? Well, more than the force of law, apparently, because they may not be too responsive to the force of law, given that they are in jail.

Would a random cheque-fraudster who finds him or herself sharing a cell with one of these disgraces to humanity think “Oh, we’ll get on really well” but then read the undisobeyable internet instructions and be obliged to torture and kill the said disgrace to humanity?

Getting climate change and asbestos wrong

Posted on Sun, 16 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

You’d think that there had been enough pop science articles about climate change for even the thickest journalists to have grasped that “global warming” is

short-hand for complicated climatic processes, more accurately referred to as anthropogenic climate change, which don’t necessarily involve warming in any given place. (For instance, the diversion of the Gulf Stream could make the UK colder.)
not specifically identifiable in any given day’s or year’s temperatures in any particular place. Climate is not necessarily the same as weather

I assume that Christopher Booker is not a complete fool. He’s expensively educated, and he studied at Cambridge. So, it’s hard to see why he’s spreading ideas as confused as those in his Telegraph article, where seems imply that climate change is pretty well only “global warming” and the fact that some Russian measurements are wrong makes it all false anyway. (I paraphrase)

The world has never seen such freezing heat
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.(from the Telegraph)

Oh dear, Christopher, the point really isn’t whether a given month is “hot”.

How can you explain this to someone who believes that it is somehow discrediting Al Gore’s arguments to mention Al Gore’s name in the context that someone he knows has been misled by being supplied with a handful of duff numbers?

The science is too difficult for me to understand, but I’m pretty confident that it rests on millions of different types of observations, over many years and all parts of the world. And the work has been analysed and peer-reviewed by legions of climate scientists.

So, it’s not actually proven. (And, granted that my own assessment that the climate has changed dramatically over my lifetime, let alone Christopher Booker’s, is anecdotal.) But there seems to be such a serious weight of evidence to support it, it would be pretty dumb to imagine it is contradicted by one month’s error figures.

Pretty well as dumb as this complete misunderstanding of the evidence on asbestosis, for example, on the basis of some spuriously-qualified scientist :

Booker’s articles in The Daily Telegraph on asbestos and also on global warming have been challenged by George Monbiot in an article in The Guardian newspaper
Booker’s scientific claims, which include the false assertion that white asbestos (chrysotile) is “chemically identical to talcum powder” were analysed in detail by Richard Wilson in his book Don’t Get Fooled Again (2008).
Wilson also highlighted Christopher Booker’s repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who has claimed to be “the world’s foremost authority on asbestos science”, but who in 2005 was convicted under the UK’s Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications, and who the BBC has accused of basing his reputation on “lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement”.(from the Criticism section of Brooker’s Wikipedia entry)

Windmill aesthetics

Posted on Wed, 12 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Buildings don’t get much more attractive than traditional windmills. More or less anyone will agree on that. It even comes as a bit of a shock to remember that windmills were industrial structures, not landscape beautification projects.

So, what is it about modern wind turbines that sends some people into a rage? In the Times, Charles Bremner claimed that the French countryside was becoming ugly because of the spread of wind turbines.

Windpower blights “la belle France”

His argument is basically that France doesn’t need the “ugly” windturbines because it has loads of nuclear power. What? Has he ever seen a nuclear power station?

The UK’s only remotely attractive one, as a building, was Trawfyndd – of which the architecture bit of the Guardian showed a flattering photograph a couple of months ago. The photo doesn’t come with the online story but here’s an extract from the text.

The tradition continued into the early nuclear age with the appointment of Basil Spence, architect of Coventry cathedral, to design Trawsfynydd in Wales. Like Scott, Spence went down the route of unabashed monumentality to reflect the awesome technology at work within. Never mind that his 20-storey monoliths in the middle of Snowdonia stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs. At the time of Trawsfynydd’s construction, in 1959, this treatment was entirely appropriate: symbolically, nuclear power was one of the few things that told Britain it was still Great. That triumphalism would soon fade, as the implications of the Windscale fire in 1957 became apparent, and environmental and peace movements started to campaign against nuclear.
One need only look at the industrial-looking nuclear eyesores built in the 1970s and 80s, such as Hartlepool or Dungeness, to see the change. Having furnished Britain with some of the ugliest buildings ever seen, British Energy took a renewed concern in the appearance of Sizewell B in the 90s.

Note, “Ugliest buikdings ever seen.”

You can see a selection of postcard views of ~~nuclear~~ carbon-friendly power plants on an odd site that google found, and you’d have to admit that, despite the stunning landscapes they are set in, the kindest description of them would be “darkly foreboding.”

OK, the concepts of beauty and ugliness are relative and individual. Let’s assume that those elegant wind turbine blades are uglier as huge concrete slab monolithic powerplants in the eyes of some beholders.

Pretend that a miraculous new way of generating energy (from fusion or electrolytic transformation or any star-trekky energy source you can imagine) has been discovered. So, the working life of a wind turbine is over. What happens to it? You just take it down. I think that’s it. (You might cause some localised pollution by dropping it in landfill. Pretty small beer compared to what we dump every day, but still, I’m trying to be fair.)

Not quite as easy to take down all the carbon-neutral new nuclear power plants is it? You need a decade or more for decommissioning. You’d still have to protect it to within an inch of its life (from accidents and terrorists) for that time. Then you’d just have to store and guard the materials for, oh I don’t know, a few thousand years.

Or, let’s assume that the star-trek energy breakthrough doesn’t happen. The turbines just spin around, collecting energy that – as far as I can tell, on recent form – is increasing, if anything. They break and can get replaced. The land, sea and air around them are as clean, or otherwise, as they would be in the absence of a turbine.

There is no reason, except aesthetics, for not siting them in the centre of big cities. If they break, they just break. They don’t go critical.

A really unlucky person might find that a broken one landed on their head. This doesn’t quite compare with Chernobyl.

(There’s a REALLY ugly power generator picture – of the post-explosion Chernobyl plant – on the Wikipedia page. I didn’t pasted it here because I’m baffled by the fair use clause.)

Imagining for one minute that you share the aesthetic sensibilities of Charles Bremner and the couple of French aristocrats he reported, it’s still a very small price to pay.

New genre discovered

Posted on Sun, 9 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

I commented on my last post to say that the Guardian link to the boxing monks video was removed. But now I’ve spotted that the BBC has it.

Watched it, decided the choreography was pretty poor but the costumes were impressive.

(I even enjoyed the ironic soundtrack, until I noticed that was my own music playing in Winamp at the same time.)

When it finished, I see that the BBC is subtly fostering a whole new internet movie genre (which is not as bad as other new genres that involve kids beating each other up or brandishing guns, so I’m willing to appreciate it, I think):

I don’t have a proper name for it yet. I think Fight Club is already taken.

So I’ll have to use the working title “Mass brawls with respectable contenders”:

South Korean parliament mass fight
Czech politicians hitting each other.
Bolivian parliament erupts in brawl
This one doesn’t really count – it’s just one-on-one fight action between the Czech PM and a photographer, but I can’t resist the opportunity to quote the BBC’s words.

The Czech prime minister has lashed out at a photographer as he was questioned about calling a snap election.

Onward, Christian soldiers

Posted on Sun, 9 November, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

This is the best headline that I’ve seen for a long time:

‘Bless me father for I have chinned’

The whole Guardian story is quite entertaining. The sub-heading says it all.

Row at holy shrine in Jerusalem sees police having to break up mass brawl between two sets of Christian monks

This isn’t exactly a new story. There’s a Youtube video link, if you want to see boxing monks that don’t come from Shaolin. (I didn’t bother. KungFu films will do for me. No one really gets hurt, except by accident.)

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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Author Archives: Polly Unsaturate

About Polly Unsaturate

European court 1 UK Home Office 0

God is at it again

Redirected Mail

Not before time

6 things

Science of science standards

A survey says

Moron Alert

Aside

Stewart Lee, the Video

This blog is bigger than god

When all else fails, blame the Internet

Getting climate change and asbestos wrong

Windmill aesthetics

New genre discovered

Onward, Christian soldiers

About Polly Unsaturate

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