The first real nano-computer has been built on a single carbon fibre according to the BBC science and technology site – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4839088.stm. The circuit is made of palladium and aluminium and is 18 millionths of a metre across.
This is a proof of concept rather than a commercial model, but still shows impressive promise for the future of tech.
Not unlike “Bad Science”, lots of History is pretty bad too. This rant will be mainly about archaeology . Well, even more, mainly about tv archaeology, that being the closest that I get to really knowing anything about archaeology.
Why do archaeologists assume that every prehistoric tribe did everything for ritual purposes? Given a dozen possible explanations for anything, religious ritual always seems to be the favoured purpose. People who see everything created in prehistory as proof of alien landings are hardly more obsessed than the average tv archaeologist is with finding evidence of religious ritual in any surviving artefacts. Even going on the chance that the average person in prehistory was about half as sceptical as the average medieval peasant, that still leaves a lot of room for secular creativity.
Even medieval peasants were always forming heretical movements and rebelling against the church. How many thousands got excommunicated or burned as witches for not believing exactly what they were told to believe? If anything - without written language or means of mass cultural communication and with a fairly even distribution of access to productive resources - prehistoric people would be less subject to pressures to believe whatever they were told. This suggests that they might have been less likely than most of the current world population to be convinced by religious authority to neglect the hunting, gathering, agriculture and socialising (that must have made up most of their lives) to create monuments to appease the gods.  In any case, might not some of the surviving constructions be relics of homes, markets, meeting halls or food stores? Giant figures carved on hillsides would be adverts or indicators of location today. Why are they always seen as having only ritual significance if they are a few thousand years old?Â
Occam’s Razor somehow doesn’t apply to tv archaeologists. Their professional rule is “Never seek the simplest explanation.”
My next gripe is with the reconstructions. The rule is: Never show any archaeology or history without a reconstruction. Some of these reconstructions are really good, as in the Battlefield Britain series. Lots of people have problems with showing rebuilt Saxon villages or using actors to portray Roman legionnaries or Celtic warriors. I don’t find these necessarily irritating. Only a complete idiot would think that this was real video footage. We all know that actors aren’t real. The use of real people and realistic surroundings can make the past seem more immediate and comprehensible. (Note that was “can”). The compulsion to illustrate with footage can get out of hand, but generally it’s not a bad idea.
Similarly with computer graphics, When they help those viewers with little visual imagination (like me) to picture a scene they can be illuminating. It’s the graphics that purport to be true that I have problems with.  Have you found a 1 sq cm piece of tile? This must be the corner of a brightly painted 450 metre square temple, complete with pillars, colonnades and a fountain, which your computer graphics team will create using 3DS Max. Is there a bit of bent metal? This must have been the corner of a shield which had a Celtic motif in the centre and gold chasing around its bevelled edges. So here it is. Found a skull? Our inhouse artists will model the face of its original owner, showing the actual eye and hair colour and hairstyle. This stuff is so manifestly ridiculous that it destroys any belief you might have had in anything else they tell you.
Apart from tv arcchaeology, I have big problems with a lot of Heritage archaeology.  This seems driven by the need to have cash cows. Does your historic monument lack vistor appeal? Maybe walls have been demolished or stones are inconveniently crumbling. Put them back. People always appreciate things looking in good shape. That’s why they restore old houses to live in. Noone can tell the difference anyway, if it’s sensitively done, can they?  Some of these ancient designers had no idea about what would attract the modern paying visitor so its just using our modern skills and knowledge to do what they woudl have done if they know how to.
The current Stonehenge controversy provides an example of millions spent on consultation (with any organisation that claims an interest) about plans which will cost many millions more. There is a major road (amjor, by Wiltshire standards) quite close to Stonehenge and a minor road that cuts off part of one of the ditches on the site. The plans involve not just moving at least one road but also
Most people who have been to Stonehenge would see the visitors’ car park and visitor centre – not to mention the demonic fences and paths that keep people from the actual stones – as the main problems. A paying customer actually sees little more than you can see for free from the road (and quite a lot less than you can see from one part of the main road which presents a panoramic view of the stones in context.) My suspicion is that its the chance of a free view that drives the owners mad. Stonehenge must be English Heritage’s biggest earner, with relatively little outlay except on clearing rubbish, staff, fencing and providing shopping facilities.
But the new plans involve digging up one of the World’s Heritage landscapes to TUNNEL under it. Plus rebuilding bits of the site to match the archaeologists’s assumptions.  If part of the site is to rebuilt, why not just stop messing about with it and build a fullscale plaster mockup in a place without traffic? Stonehenge already shows the impact of Victorian archaeologists’ putting stones back where they thought they should be, so its already quite ersatz enough.   The damage was already done when the road was built. Why make it worse?  At least it’s legitimate and relatively innocent damage now. Real people needed a road for purposes that roads are normally used for, so they built one, more or less ignoring the stones. In a few hundred years it will be part of the history of the Stonehenge site – ugly but at least genuine.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood the tunnelling plan. I suspect that, given a toss-up between digging up ground brimming with 6,000 year-old construction work (the significance of which we really don’t currently have the understanding to grasp) and attracting the tourist pound/euro/dollar or Yen, the need for cash won. The so-called “cursus” was not considered to be anything significant at all, until about 30 years ago. Hence it was left alone, under the relatively benign  protection of a working farmer rather than the apparently unscrupulous hands of the heritage industry.
In this month’s English Heritage newsletter, a tv archaeologist wrote about how atmospheric Stonehenge would have appeared to the pilgrim of 6,000 years ago and how reconstructing the site would allow us to have this experience. This exemplifies the most woolly-minded heritage pesh: –
There were no “pilgrims” before the Christian era, surely. There is no evidence that Stonehenge was the endpoint of prehistoric devotional journeys. Even after thousands of years of casual destruction, there are stunning megalithic monuments throughout the whole of the British Isles. Why would Stonehenge have been any more significant than any other henge at the time it was actually used? Its significance to us is a Victorian legacy.Â
The “atmospheric” idea is fine if you think only in terms of the vistor’s enjoyment but it is completely unrelated to any historical or archaeological value of Stonehenge. Prehistoric monuments are not just for holidays. They aren’t just ours. We have no way of knowing what future technologies will uncover if we can just stop ragging all prehistoric sites to death for our own short term goals. Do we have the right to contribute to damaging the heritage of future generations? If the “atmosphere” and the “experience”  are so important, why not build a prehistory theme park – preferably on a site already ravaged by industrial development – with no visible reminders of the twentyfirst century (or any of the other centuries in between the building of Stonehenge and now)? Avebury is inconveniently distant, so that could be added close by. Silbury Hill would provide a convenient backdrop. In fact, why not build replica pyramids nearby so you could compare Silbury with a stone pyramid of about the same era?  I believe the pyramids also have disturbing surroundings that stop you forgetting you are not in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. Angkor Watt is supposed to be really amazing as well, but is so awkwardly inaccessible. That could be there too.
Oh, silly me. I forgot that there is already a Disneyland Europe.
There is a bird-flu style epidemic of bad science. The clearly ludicrous bad science examples in the Guardian columns may be just pale moons of the dark star of bad hard science.
For example, a South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, has just been sacked from Seoul National University and 6 of his colleagues have been suspended or fined(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4824486.stm). They were found to have faked stem cell research from cloned embryos.
A scientist who claims to have created bubble fusion in the lab is also facing an investigation this week by an American university, which is looking at his colleagues’ claims that he won’t let them look at his data or challenge his claims.Â
In many of the currently fashionable research fields (stem cell research, cloning, nanotechnology) there are examples of exaggerated claims or results that can’t be replicated. These are all the big money topics and must be very tempting to the greedy and those who want to make a global reputation quickly. Should we care if duff scientists want to rip off the big corporations who fund this stuff? It suggests the old saying that you can never con an honest person. Classic cons play on the victim’s greed. Clearly, the funding for most of these fakeries comes from organisations that expect to get even richer than they are already.
However, quite apart from the arguments that government and big business only get their resources from the rest of us and only have finite amounts to invest so aren’t putting money into other projects and so on, most of these phoney projects play on sick people’s desperation, just like predatory mediums and faith healers.
They make huge promises for what their research will achieve – cures for cancer, heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimers or an end to dependence on fossil fuels and global warming.
A shady alternative mystical crystal aromatherapy hoeopathic flower remedy diet guru can usually only raise false hopes in a limited number of not very bright people. Most of us have enough basic sense of cause and effect to suspect the logic behind their claims. What does this say about the people who commission research?  More charitably, very few people have the knowledge to challenge claims for genetic and nano-technologies. (That’s supposed to be the point of peer evaluation.)
MY particular rant here is that we do have ethical standards. We are so used to assuming we can’t understand what scientists are doing that we also assume that they are just pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Research scientists are somehow nobler than everybody else and wouldn’t do experiments that might be socially disastrous or unspeakably cruel or even just pointless. We tend to assume the ethical goodness of pure research despite knowing intellectually that much research is funded by people we would saw off our left foot rather than buy a used car from and scientists are as greedy, manipulative and dishonest as non-scientists.
So this rant is basically saying that formal highbrow opera science can be as spurious as the soap opera science that Bad Science identifies.
How do we counteract this sort of thing? Not accepting a claim on the basis of the authority of the person who’s making it. Questioning and testing every “fact” that we are told. Questioning our own assumptions. Abandoning ideas when they prove to be mistaken. Accepting that no one learns except by making mistakes.
Science teaching is in a particular bind here. The nature of science is supposed to be experimentation but science education necessarily mainly consists of learning lots of “facts” and memorising them.  Even arts and social science courses currently reward students most for citing endless authorities like so many medieval monks.
Click on http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore to see the preview of a game that is supposed to be in development. Perservere or fast forward through the explanations and the early stages of the evolution of creatures and worlds. After about 17 minutes you can start to see the possibilities.
This game looks like genius because it brings together aspects of games from the basic Game of Life through Civilisation to galactic war space games. It is very complex, so it doesn’t seem likely to have a very wide appeal except for people who like world building games and would still like them without the preset scenarios. The genius is in design – the amazing levels of interactivity and the incorporation of so many elements. The designers must be both brilliant and blessed/cursed with the most workaholic capacities, because it looks like about ten years’ work just to have prepared the demo and probably half the lifetime of the universe to get a playable game issued. but I look forward to seeing it.
Writing .htaccess files is something of an arcane art. The problem discussed previously was to do with not having the obligatory /. However, no sooner had the redirect seemed to be working perfectly when the whole site disappeared under the weight of a 500 error (which is being worke don at this moment.)
First stop on looking for how to switch files to a new location without losing search engine ranking is to use a redirect 301, the syntax for which is on http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect
However, to make it clear why and how to do this, there was a fair bit of useful help in more comprehensible English on http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ as well as some (as yet untested but apparently good) Search Engine Optimisation advice.
As promised or threatened below, you can now read a couple of pages on Alfred the Great on the etrusia website. It seems he was pretty great as a guerilla fighter against the Dabes and reasonably great, by Saxon standards, in that he had social policies aimed at promoting peace, justice (in Saxon terms) and education.
However, in case saying this might amount to glorifying him as a resistance leader and would therefore contravene the new law, I will say that he seems to have been a reasonably good ruler and surprisingly long-reigning for a Saxon. See a list of Anglo-Saxon kings. Relatively few outlasted a year, in the face of strenuous attempts by their rivals to take over (assassination/banishment and so on).
Total sympathy for the PayPal saga. PayPal is impenetrable enough at the best of times. I can’t say I ever worked out how to use it in the first place.
The style of customer service does make a mockery of the new god of customer service, but is so typical of the way that customers’ requirements of a service are the last thing that most companies seem to concern themselves with.
Have you ever sat down and said:
“Well, I would find my bank/energy provider/ISP/phone company” (fill in your own product provider) ” much better if it made me spend hours on the phone at my own expense listening to tinny recorded music and hearing how important my call is to them. I am also p*d off that they pay attention to my letters and emails and provide answers that relate to the matters I raise. If only they would repeatedly send me standard letters that bear no relation to my concerns. And I would rather be addressed by someone with only a passing familiarity with my language, if at all possible”Â
It’s good that they are responding to this barrage of consumer demand by providing the exact services we are all begging for.
When does a robbery become a heist? BBC news today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/4749980.stm) refers to “Two more arrests after £50m heist.”
It used to appear that “heists” were only robberiesthat took part in movies, but this odd word is obviously spilling out into news reports. Is there a bottom level value after which an ordinary theft becomes a heist? One hundred pounds stolen clearly does not constitute a heist.  A million?  Pretty likely to be a heist. What about 5,000? 10,000? Can one person pull off a heist, or does it have to involve an illicitly-skilled Ocean’s Eleven-style team?
Maybe there is a special police unit that classifies crimes into robberies or heists.
Alfred the Great? or not Great?
Given that I get most of my limited  history knowledge from the television or the Internet, I have no idea what the answer to this is.
Simon Schama’s TV History seemed to regard Alfred (better called by the more typographically attractive AElfred combination) as definitely great. The first King of England (minus the bits the Danes had) crowned in London.
However, most other TV history programmes suggest that Alfred was not Great at all. Just a Wessex king who managed to give away half of England.
Does anyone know what else Alfred is supposed to have done (except prove himself inferior to Mr Kipling?)Â Did he start the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle being written?
I will investigate and try to get some answers. If I succeed I will post an article on the Saxons part of  our British history site http://www.etrusia.co.uk
The paranoia about bird flu was bound to lead to bird killing. Bird flu appears to be spreading fast and the responses of national authoritties are to kill birds in their thousands.
The BBC reports Indian officals involved in mass bird exterminations (half a million) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4728952.stm German soldiers have been sent in to a German region affected by bird flu. (What are soldiers supposed to do against a virus?)
Nobody forced us to keep millions of chickens, largely in horrific battery conditions in Western Europe. We are hopelessly prodigal with chicken life and expect to buy chickens and eggs for almost nothing.
When a consequence of this food policy bits us in the butt, what is the usual response? Kill them off. The desire to kill domesticated chickens is doubtful enough but the fact that wild birds have also been found with the virus suggests that killing wild birds is probably next.
The possibility of massive damage to the ecosystem from this sort of action would probably only concern us when there are too few birds left to prevent mass extinctions. This is really too horrible to contemplate.
Channel 4 showed a programme about the Celts. This was good beacuse it is always good to see tv programmes about interesting historical topics. There were some fascinating sites and objects.
However, it was also bad – or at least irritating – because any tv history seems compelled
PHP 4 seemed relatively easy to get to grips with after an initial hair-tearing out period. I have now been told that PHP 5 is a step toward making it as unpleasant to use as any Visual Studio style langauage. That is, it has an object model that you have to stick to and variables have to declared properly and so on….
I thought the value of php was due to the way that any half-arsed neophyte could get a dynamic website running without having to worry about the demonic “object classes” and so on.
Is it true that standard programming logic has replaced the pleasantly ad hoc nature of php4 coding? If so, how back-compatible is it? Can I continue writing illogical but fast php code or do I have to draw a dozen class diagrams before I start and decide the names and types of any variable I might choose to create before I start?
On the plus side is it true that there is a short php5Â alternative to the dreaded dbConnector stuff? Is it really easy to set up?
I want to know if it’s worth struggling with the new version in the hope it will have advantages, in the face of the fact that installing and configuring the thing is always the worst bit.
Are we turning into “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”? (Don’t answer that) There are way too many rants as compared to raves.
So this is a rave about D and D online. It will be out in March sometime and it is in beta now. To be frank, I have only back-seat driven it but it seems really good so far. It’s shaping up to be what World of Warcraft promised – but failed – to become. That is, it seems to involve more than just endless killing of endless monsters in the same way. It also doesn’t make you spend half the game trying to find your way back to be reborn.
Some AD&D experinece will help but isn’t necessary. The player interaction can be as interesting as playing AD&D for real. (Except you don’t get to roll d20s but you don’t have to do endless calculations either.) It is a faithful adaptation of the game, with the human element but added good graphics. There are lots of wierd moves that various characters can do.
I think the Ohio state link mentioned below (http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5263.html) is a good example of legitimate science serving as “bad science”. The words “Research shows that a positive self-concept is more important to academic success than a high IQ score” are pure bad science. Clearly, a child who respects him or herself and is confident of his or her abiliity is likely to do better in life than one plagued by nervousness and self-loathing. However, encouraging children to become confident is an activity that fits into the moral category of making your children as happy as you can.
I refuse to belive there is any evidence that it will make them do better at school. Kids who are more confident in school are likely to have experieneced success at acdemic things and to come from a background that encourages academic success and therefore confidence. So academically successful kids are already acdemically confident . Just as people who are good at sports are likely to be more confident on the pitch. Confidence probably wouldn’t improve your goal-scoring average and I suspect that few people who can’t score goals would do better if they had more confidence.
Whose “research” is this? Isn’t a high IQ score already a piece of bad science which has been written into our educational polices? At least it’s measurable. There is no baseline indicator of confidence. Surely it varies enormously throughout the day, according to the situation one is in.
Anyone who has ever filled in one of those self-defining questionnaires will know that a respondent’s answers to any question are never true or consistent.
I also read the New Scientist report but don’t have it to hand. It claimed low self-esteem was not usually a factor in creating bullies, as was widely assumed. The report argued that bullies tended to be pretty full of self-esteem. It was their less fortunate victims whose self-esteem went down the tubes. Sorry, I can’t find the reference either but the title was something along the lines of “Raising self-esteem no panacea for bullies”
Bad Science is really good at pointing out the nonsense in the unsupported dietary and medical advice that seems to be everywhere in the media now. There seems to be a huge market for any theory that mixes a few bits of knowledge or insight with a lot of prescriptive nonsense to create a bizarre new set of quasi-medical instructions. The Guardian’s own alternative health column is one of the worst offenders, sadly.
 I’d also like to see some discussion of actual “scientist-produced” bad science. A fair number of experiments reported in the popular science press seem pretty dubious ethically and logically. I will collect some examples and post here.
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