This is really interesting. It’s a programme from teacher’s tv about brain research. (Yes, Teacher’s TV. I kid you not. It’s not all Key stage 3 in Geography.)
It really makes you think. The savant skills are amazing. There’s an experiment that seems to show that turning off a bit of the brain makes people better at seeing what’s really there. There’s loads about the nature of creative thought.
Ok, it is generally accepted that “luck” is a very difficult concept to quantify scientifically. Everyone has their own idea what it is and some people even think it has a “cause” and can be manipulated. Gamblers have a notoriously twisted idea of what “luck” is and how it can seemingly overcome mathematical certainties. Historically, humans from every corner of the globe have even objectified it into religions and religious icons. For some reason, certain Christians have a pagan approach to luck and think praying to the invisible will influence “luck” in their favour. All very strange.
Anyway, in view of this, I have spent the last few weeks carrying out an experiment that I am, as I have always suspected, cursed with bad luck… My PC is not possessed by the devil, it doesn’t hate me, I am just very unlucky – which is why every time I need an internet connection it goes down. This is not good news, but at least it explains why every week I do the national lottery and, despite the odds, I never get a single number. Ever. Now, part of me suspects the odds against that are greater than the odds against winning the lottery, but now I know the real reason©™.
My experiment has been simple. There are, basically, two routes I can take from work to get home. Because of the hideous nature of road traffic, my journey home normally takes in excess of an hour and I travel at the majestic average speed of 29mph. Aren’t modern cars wonderful. The upside of this mind numbing tedium is that I have time to think about things, and I realised that no matter which route I take, it takes me about the same lenght of time to get home and more importantly whatever lane I choose, the other goes faster.
Any drivers out there will undoubtedly share that experience. You are stuck in snail like traffic and all around you the cars are going faster. You change lane, only to discover the other lane has started moving. It is more than a little annoying.
So, during my thinking, I decided to see what was the best thing to do. Should I pick a lane and stay in it? Should I change as much as possible and fight my way forward. I know strong advocates of both options. Add to this, which route should I take?
From this, my experiment was formed… The plan was, over the course of several weeks to drive home a different way each time. Weeks 1 – 3 I would take “Route A” and then weeks 4 – 6 would be “Route B”. Although all at about the same time of day, each week would be either staying in the left hand lane, staying in the right hand lane or changing lanes as instinct dictates. As a “control” for the first two weeks, I would make a note of a car that joined about the same time as I did but in the other lane and see if they were ahead or behind me.
Anyway, today it all ended and the results were in. The basic conclusion is that I am cursed with bad luck. Seriously.
The average journey times for both routes was about 1hr 30mins (with very little deviation), giving me an average speed of 31mph. Wonderful eh? It seems that neither route was better, and changing lanes was no faster or slower than staying put. Also, it didn’t really matter what lane I was in, the time was pretty much the same.
Weirder still came when I was doing the “single lane” part. Every single time, every day for four of the six weeks, what ever lane I was in turned out to be the slowest. Without fail, a vehicle that joined the traffic the same time as me, would make faster progress if they were in a different lane to me. In some instances the other lane was going so fast I lost the vehicle (and visibility on this stretch is quite far), while in others, they were only a few minutes ahead of me – but they were ALWAYS ahead.
Like I said, the only redeeming feature of this is at least now I know why I never get a single number on the lottery. Maybe Luck hates Atheists. Or just me…
The silly – albeit flattering – view that atheists are not as stupid as religious people, according to some deeply spurious IQ -based research, has suddenly got a boost from an unexpected quarter.
“God is not just for the stupid, say Christianity’s clever people”, according to the Telegraph.
Who are these clever people?
“The Christian think tank Theos “
Well, that still makes none, by my reckoning.
The post about this daft research on the Register also brought a swathe of Christian commenters who all seemed to know their “IQ” to the exact unfeasibly high last digit. (Thereby suggesting, if nothing else, that a high level of belief in the objective validity and accuracy of IQ scores correlates with a high level of belief in, well, anything.)
Nice comment, from “Carl”
I always thought that the reason that there were less stupid comments on El Reg articles on a Sunday was because IT pros don’t work weekends – now I know it’s because they’re all at church…
Matthew Parris is much saner than a former Tory MP has any right to be. He proved this again with a good piece in the Times. He was arguing against thought crimes.
I am driven to my wits’ end by my fellow humans’ feeble grasp of principled reasoning. .
I feel your pain, brother!
He discussed the new proposal that “anyone found with drawings (or computer-generated images) of child sexual abuse will face up to three years in prison.” Parris pointed out that making images of abusing real children is genuinely different from making imaginary representations, however repellent such imaginary images are.
Maria Eagle, the Justice Minister, said that the move was not intended to curb creativity or freedom of expression but to tackle images that had “no place in society”. Crikey – the intellectual sloppiness!….. The logical extension of Ms Eagle’s principle is almost boundless.
That is, there are an endless number of things that “have no place in society.” But, as soon as we start restricting expression to things we like, we start down a dangerous road. Surely, almost every TV show or Hollywood movie shows things that we don’t want to be true. And not just the endless shootings and stabbings in crime shows and action movies. What about the bickering morons portrayed in soaps? These definitely should have “no place in society”.
In fact, if it was left to me, there is no end to the things I don’t think have a place in society. Luckily, it’s not left to me. Thank your personal deity for that, all you women carrying miniature dogs in your handbag and masquerading as Paris Hilton, for example.
In fact, on the topic of deities – personal or otherwise – Parris extended the point about attempts to outlaw people’s chosen means of expression, however repugnant, to the issue of the new law
requiring fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers and mediums to stipulate explicitly that their services are for “entertainment only”
He pointed out that this principle should surely apply equally to faith-healing and, indeed, to all churches.
Is Parliament aware of any harder evidence for the efficacy of faith-healing than for the reliability of clairvoyance? I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, let the collecting boxes in church display a sign “for entertainment purposes only” and let Catholics buy candles to light “for entertainment purposes only”; and let trips to Lourdes be sold “for entertainment purposes only”. And let the raiment of the priest administering the Sacrament be embroidered likewise.
Imagine the churchyard billboard: the Power of Prayer (for entertainment purposes only).
Well, we can but dream… All the same, if laws to save people from their own gullibility are going to be passed, why should more mainstream official churches be exempt?
Wow number 1
A cursory check hasn’t turned up any other blogs that deal with this one. So, here’s a link to BBC post about a fossil fish that presents evidence of live birth.
The 380 million-year-old specimen has been preserved with an embryo still attached by its umbilical cord.
The find, reported in Nature, pushes back the emergence of this reproductive strategy by some 200 million years.
In your faces, yet again, young earth creationists. Though I suppose it’s another of those incomprehensible god-tests where he sticks evidence that contradicts the book of genesis just to sort out those people who prefer evidence to myth so he can put their names in the “go straight to hell for doubting the magic words” book
Wow number 2
Monkeys have been able to control robot arms to feed themselves, using the power of thought alone.
I’m not the world’s greatest fan of messing about with the bodies and brains of animals but the implications of this research are pretty amazing.
Does this mean that we can finally carry out the 100 monkeys with typewriters experiment?
Wow number 3
Mars. How great that it looks like an abandoned farm planet.
Small whines.. I have to moan a bit about the false colouring, which makes the enterprise seem a little spurious. Why didn’t they use colour cameras? (Yes, space bandwidth, and so on. I don’t care. I want full-colour images.)
And I could have done with fewer pictures of the lander. It’s a bit like taking a holiday in Angkor Wat and then putting yourself in the foreground of every photo.
Aside from these tiny gripes about the presentation, seeing the surface of Mars is fantastic.
Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests. (New Scientist article about research by James Dow.)
Now who could argue with software? It’s not as if software can only give out results in the way it’s been programmed to or anything….
By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish
Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that religion is a mental artefact, co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.
Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious. (From the New Scientist article)
I am basing my opinion on a cursory reading of a pop-science version of real research that I have only skimmed (and I expect some more careful reader will comment to challenge my surface arguments with facts.) But, I take this to mean that the algorithm seems to indicate that telling convincing lies has evolutionary advantages. No surprise there. Otherwise politicians would have long been extinct.
But, are lies about gods in some other even-more-genetically-advantageous category than just regular lies? This experiment appears to favour the religious only when others help them:
Under most scenarios, “believers in the unreal” went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished
So, this research actually implied that belief in lies was not a successful survival strategy? Unless the goalposts were moved to make it one?
I assume that the arbitrary attractors could arise from activities such as like embedding lies in interesting stories. Some myths are somehow compelling. Narrative is attractive. (The attractiveness of narrative is itself something of an evolutionary mystery.) All the same, I am largely unconvinced by the explanatory power of the arguments, the choice of variables and the specific values assigned to them
However, science being science – i.e. developed through experiment and debate rather than through accepting erroneous beliefs because they come with clear but arbitrary attractive signals – I can test it out. The software can be downloaded under the GNU public licence. This is so admirable a way to conduct and spread research that I have to tip an oversized conceptual hat to James Dow.
It’s the 15th birthday of the release of the source code for the World Wide Web, according to the BBC.
Just 15 years. And it’s already almost impossible to remember how we lived before tinterweb.
The first ever web site was http://info.cern.ch. It’s still there (the site not the same web page…) It is pretty rubbish, which is oddly comforting. (No reasonable menu, you can only find the other pages by going to the sitemap, elements don’t fit exactly, in IE6, and they use style attributes in tags instead of the class definition 🙂 ) There’s some screenshots of Tim Berners-Lee’s first browsers, which could give present-day browsers some serious competition.
It links to CERN’s proper site which is brilliant, although most of it is so far over my head that i might as well be reading an umbrella.
The web itself has become indispensable. Especially for finding out anything you want to know – instantly. It’s true that much of what you get is spurious, but the more of us that develop a built-in bullshit detector the better.
And mostly, it’s great that the web has grown so fast precisely because it was designed to be free and open and collaborative The BBC reported Robert Cailliau:
“We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that.” ………
“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.
(Maybe someone should tell the DRM fanatics.)
The nonsense, and false controversy, created by Expelled just seems to never want to go away. In this respect the Discovery Institute really hit on to a winner with what could best be described as a poor first attempt by an art student film. Atheist and science blogs have been discussing the nonsense for what seems like eternity. I cant imagine how anyone could even begin to pay for this amount of publicity but there you go. Sadly, I actually feel that all this furore around the crap film is actually required.
Once upon a time I was optimistic about the human race. In this mindset I would have thought to myself “everyone seeing this film will realise it is total bullshit and ignore it.” I have, sadly, learned to think differently. When nonsense is placed into the public domain it can be either challenged or ignored. By challenging it the nonsense rises to the status of “controversy” and there is (in the public mind at least) the concept of a debate taking place. By ignoring it, the unthinking public begin to think it has merit and it slowly becomes an accepted “truth.” It really is a lose:lose situation for rational science. I can not think of a way to avoid the nonsense taking over the Earth, but at least, where I can, I will try to challenge it.
With this in mind, I came across a gorgeous picture of an American church on flickr. This is a very attractive picture so please, take a moment to visit and have a look – if you have a flickr account, please let the photographer know what you think of the picture (and he has a pretty good photostream).
It all went downhill, however, when I read the description of the picture.
Freedom of thought and expression are two of the most basic tenants of any free society.
Without those two things, you do not have a free society.
Well, I pretty much agree. They may well not be the most basic tenets of society but freedom of expression is very important. On a pedantic note, I cant see how (realistically) you can take away someone’s freedom of thought until mind-reading becomes commonplace.
We went to a must see movie this weekend. In Ben Stein’s (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”) new documentary movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Ben shows how little academic freedom exists in our universities if you want to discuss unpopular topics like the origins of life. (links removed here but intact on the original)
Ouch. And he had got off to such a good start. Notice how this brings in the Creationist stand-by of creating the false associations with “academic freedom” and “unpopular topics”? Creationism / ID relies on trickery to convince the unthinking that it is a legitimate “alternative” and some secret cabal are trying to repress it. The “freedom” word is thrown around whenever someone tries to point out is not science to the extent that the average non-scientist actually thinks it is an oppressed viewpoint. Amazing really.
Much of the academic world thinks that the conversation should be closed because Darwinian Evolution has answered all of those questions… But, is that true????
Another creationist gem. This is a great question because it is massively false. No scientist, especially evolutionary biologists, think the conversation should be closed. That is the claim made by the creationists. However, this 180 degree spin goes a long way to masking that.
If you do not think that is true as a professor, get ready to loose you job. Yes, that politically incorrect thought has been banned in the university… I thought the university was a place of open discussion and thought???? Think again…
And here is the first falsehood. No professor who thinks the question about origins of species is not closed would lose their job. A professor who is so confused about their subject area as to think Creationism is an “alternative” to evolution should lose their job in the same manner that a physics professor who thinks the luminiferous ether exists, and propagates light, should lose their job. Imagine a woodwork teacher who thought you could cut would with butter, should he remain teaching? No. But not because “politically incorrect thought has been banned.”
Further on, as part of a short debate, the photographer comments:
You are exactly what the movie was talking about… you just to creationism the moment that intelligent design is brought up…
and you assume that all tenants of darwinian evolution are true..
and you think they are well defined….
Darwinian evolition is a mess… It is not science in the least…
More weirdness. Creationism is ID. No one assumes all the tenets of “Darwinian Evolution” are true, no one even assumes all the “tenets” of Evolution are true. That is not what science is about. The odd bit is the claim that Evolution is not science… I really struggle to get my head round the idea that people can honestly think Creationism Intelligent Design is “good science” compared to evolution. Where is the falsifiability? Where are the predictions?
After a while others join in the debate with things like this (from an otherwise reasonable person):
All that said, Wayne I completely agree that the way the discussion is silenced in academia is shameful. When scientist trot out the “earth is flat” idea they forget that at one time “scientiist” accepted that idea too. In other words, the commonly accepted “facts” might be wrong.
Argh. Do people honestly think that the academic world should engage in constant debate over all possible alternatives to a scientific theory? When did scientists EVER think the world was flat?
The last point I want to make before I remind everyone to go and look at the picture themselves is based on this:
We know from the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) www.entropylaw.com/ stuff always breaks down and degrades…. macro evoution requires more information to be added to produce more complex things…. second law of thermodynamics directly contratics that…. btw.. this is a law… meaning it always happen… not a theory like evolution…
Ouch. That good old standby the 2nd law. Obviously the Earth lives in isolation from the rest of the universe and no information (energy) can be added. Damn that Sun…
The best bit is the Law / Theory nonsense. Do people really not understand how the words work? Obviously not, because when challenged on the matter, our creationist photographer responded:
With all due respect, you are wrong about scientific law and theory.
You can read here science.kennesaw.edu/~rmatson/3380theory.html and a million other places…
Argh. Such madness, especially as the link doesn’t really support his claim but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to try an educate him.
Please, take a moment to visit the Flickr photo page. It is a nice picture and the more sensible, reasonable and educational comments he get, the greater the chance he (or others) will learn something. If the nonsense is ignored, then the nonsense prospers.
Seven cloned sniffer dogs are now training in South Korea. These are Labrador puppies cloned from a good sniffer dog, with the aim of upping the current 30% of dogs that can do the job well to a notional 90%.
In my ignorance, I would imagine you could just breed three times as many dogs if you wanted three times as many dogs with good smelling skills. Dog breeding costs, erm, nothing, done the natural way. OK. maybe it does have a cost, in practice, given that pedigree dogs can cost a few hundred pounds.
How much do these cloned dogs cost?
The state-funded project cost about 300m won ($300,000; £150,000) (from the BBC).
In a slightly older BBC story, it was reported that an American woman is paying a South Korean dog-cloning company £76,000 to clone her pet pit bull. Well, it looks as if she’s getting ripped off compared to S Korean customs, who are paying about £21,429 for each dog, but then her pet was dead before it got cloned ….
So, here we have 8 dogs that cost £226,000. I could round up twice that many – most of them pit bulls – from my street (and I’m sure they’d happily breed a few dozen more for free.) It’s not as if dogs are an endangered species. In fact, the local pound puts many times that number to death every day. Hardly money wisely spent in terms of pound of dog flesh per pound.
Do we have to have Brave New World as well as 1984? I really do prefer my dystopian novels to be literature rather than social blueprints.
Make sure to breathe 17,280 times a day. It’s for the good of your health. Don’t forget to take those breaths or your health will suffer.
🙂
OK, there’s no guidance yet on how much air you should breathe. Maybe that’s just because nobody has worked out how to sell air yet. Not so for water. How many times have you heard that you should drink x amount of water a day? You might have even heard that tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer and wine somehow don’t count as containing water. It’s not just the Penelope Keiths either. Even the respectable and respected nutrition advisers seem to give out this tosh. The Food Standards Agency, for instance, presents a sanitised version of the “other drinks may not count” argument.
The British Nutrition Foundation cites unspecified authorities to recommend an amount. More crucially, it says thirst doesn’t tell you when you need water.
Health professionals recommend at least 1.5 to 2 litres (6-8 cups) of liquids a day in temperate climates. The sensation of thirst is not triggered until there is already a water deficit, so it is important to drink before you get thirsty.
So, it’s pleasant to see a public debunking of the “drink 2 litres of water a day myth”. A Penn U study showed that there was no health benefit to drinking extra water.
You don’t get much more of an insistent human drive than thirst. So why do we have so many “experts” telling us that thirst isn’t a good guide to needing water? We may be bad at letting our hunger tell us when to eat. But thirst is pretty basic.
There are a very few circumstances (e.g. heat stroke if you’ve suddenly moved from winter Finland to summer Malaysia) in which your own thirst isn’t a good guide to how much you should drink.
(In any case, I wonder how anyone could drink as little as 2 litres of water-based fluid a day. I’ve had that before lunchtime, if coffee counts.)
What is the best survival strategy for wild animals? The evidence suggests that it’s being hated by humans. There is nothing like a programme to bring any species’ numbers down to boost the population. This seems to bode ill for pandas and polar bears, but it’s working out fine for for magpies, rats, mice, pigeons, flies and fleas.
On the Guardian website, Graham Holliday says that there’s a war on wild boar in France.
In the UK guidance by Defra on how to cull the growing wild boar population was published in February. The British government has decided against a state-led cull saying that the damage currently caused by wild boar is too minimal to be of concern, but some people in France are seriously worried.
There are 1,000 feral boar in the UK, apparently. DEFRA have given advice on how to kill them, which doesn’t seem too hands-off to me, but, then, I haven’t read the guidance.
The French are apparently taking the threat of wild boar rampaging through their celtic villages, snuffling their magic potion and overturning their roundhouses seriously. Oh sorry, that was in Asterisk.
And if you read the Observer article about the French, it seems their imaginary wild boar rampages caused
…. an estimated 20,000 car accidents a year involving the animals and hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to crops and property
To reference another meat animal – Bull. Those figures are so blatantly spurious, they are hardly worth challenging.
The surprising thing is how many people see wild creatures as threats to people, rather than welcoming them as signs that we still haven’t managed to destroy the ecosystems that support us..
One commenter (Trxr) says
where you get the munters (including certain celebs who should concentrate on paying their divorce settlements to their temporary trophy-wives) screaming about a roo cull here in Australia. There’s a lot more than a thousand of the things roaming about here.
Another commenter (the aptly monikered “Ishouldapologise”) on the Guardian article says, in what I assume to be a sarcastic way:
Bring back the Weald, I say. Bring back the bears and the wolves and the wildcats. Bring back the eagles and the adders and packs of wild dogs. Bring back a little magic into this overfarmed country. Who cares if the occasional tourist or country inhabitant gets killed or eaten. That’s what the same people want for Africa and the Amazon, don’t they.
Well, yes, actually, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
It is really lucky – in terms of survival of some species, if not biodiversity – that all the creatures we hate and fear seem to thrive on our opposition if they don’t get made extinct. Any creatures that we like seem to be going extinct in direct proportion to how much we value them. Except for pets, but I doubt that the pet species could survive for long without Pedigree Chum and Whiskas.
One BBC writer on hating magpies on the grounds of an almost universal UK superstition:
The sight of another lone magpie still stops me short. Far from wanting the numbers to halve, I instantly want them to double.
Maybe the point is relevant in a wider context. Our desire to wipe out certain wild species might just serve to double their numbers, following some obscure law of nature….
Ben Goldacre (BadScience columnist from the Guardian) presented a programme about nutrition fads, on BBC Radio 4 today. It’s the first of a two-part series, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists. You can hear a podcast on the Radio 4 site. (Pick Monday’s choice.) It’s quite entertaining. In this part, Goldacre talks about the history of some classic quackery.
In contrast, today’s Guardian prints a piece by Madeleine Bunting in favour of unscientific medicine. Referring to several anti-alternative medicine books, as well as Dawkins’ 2007 TV series The Enemies of Reason. Bunting says:
It seems the aim of some of these authors is to finish off a burgeoning health industry that they believe is based on charlatans and quacks preying on the gullible and desperate.
This is one of the most common charges made against complementary medicine – that most of it is no better than placebo. But there is a way of turning that accusation around: perhaps complementary medicine is an effective way to harness placebo as one of the most powerful – and cheapest – of healing processes.
Mind and body can’t be conceptually separated. We know relatively little about how they interact. There’s plenty of room for research into how we can use the mind to fight illness. But I still can’t see how this can justifies encouraging the sick to believe in lies.
Why bother with scientific medicine at all, if you can just carry out a ritual or hand out a sugar pill?
Reason number 1 comes down to a similar point to that expressed in the question “Why won’t god heal amputees?” Can you cure cholera by reflexology? That is, alternative medicine “works” where symptoms are ill-defined and at least partly emotional in nature. Or as Bunting says, putting a positive spin on it:
Complementary medicine is most popular where conventional medicine fails, such as with musculoskeletal conditions and mental health – stress, depression, anxiety
Well, if some people’s mental conditions can be cured by ritual, surely these are revealed to be states of mind rather than organic disease. I bet the rituals don’t work so well with brain damage, dementia or full blown psychosis. So isn’t that like saying, lies aren’t powerful enough to cure real diseases.
Reason number 2. There are plenty of things that can make you feel happier/more relaxed/more cared for. These can be your own ritual practices or substances. (In the Asterisk books, the Brits’ magic potion is a cup of tea.)
You don’t necessarily have to pay for them. You do have to pay for alternative medicine.
In its raw form, a placebo may indeed be one of the cheapest healing process (as Bunting says). However, once you pay for the time of the “understanding” practitioner who prescribes you a 30 ml bottle of water, you enter into a commercial transaction that compares very badly with the cost of visiting a doctor, if you live anywhere with a public health service.
Reason 3: Alternative therapies are “alternative” because they haven’t been proved to work. End of story. Yes, medical research is pretty flawed in many ways. But, the very fact that new drugs are immensely profitable for drug companies and expensive for healthcare funders indicates why promising new treatments are unlikely to be ignored. If an alternative medicine or treatment worked, there would be an unseemly scramble to patent it or to use it to replace expensive drugs.
There must be hundreds of traditional medicines and bizarre treatments that would be effective against various illnesses. The only way to find this out is to test them. Why would the discoverer or inventor of an unusual cure not want to test it? Fear it doesn’t work. Fear of loss of profit.
Reason 4: Alternative medicine is generally the exact reverse of “empowering” despite the claims of its supporters. When you give up your power to evaluate solutions to your physical and mental illnesses, you must take the practitioner’s rituals as authoritative, with no basis for doing so except their claims.
Most of us would feel ripped off if we went to buy a toaster, paid for a toaster and were told – in a caring way – that we had got a toaster, when all we took home was an empty box. So, why is it OK to sell people treatments that don’t work? Indeed, not just morally acceptable but apparently desirable, according to Bunting?
Distressing news for those of us who have read too many fairy tales and fantasy novels.
A South Koran professor admitted to faking his anti-aging research, according to the BBC website.
The professor claimed he had found out how to extend the lifespan of mammalian cells, using a technology dubbed MAGIC, or magnetism-based interactive capture
Prolonging life through magic – now that would be living the dream.
This is a response to Ashutosh’s thoughtful and thought-provoking blog on Top 5 reasons why so many intelligent liberals dislike nuclear power. I am aware that many scientists feel that the opposition to nuclear power comes from a failure to understand the science. I feel that, on the other hand, promoters of nuclear power fail to understand that humans are social animals. I think that Ashutosh has pretty well expressed how many hard scientists see the issue.
I don’t know if I count as an intelligent liberal but here are my personal top 5. (I am not even going to get into the issue of the fact that nuclear weapons are indeed dependent on the products of the nuclear industry. Nor that Chernobyl and Goiana showed the real effects of relatively localised nuclear disasters. I’m just sticking them in an aside.)
1. The potential for an accident is huge. Too huge and too devastating to be acceptable. If this isn’t a real problem, why don’t they build nuclear power stations in the centre of New York or London?
2 The technology is intrinsically vulnerable to deliberate attack in ways that vastly exceed the potential damage from other forms of power generation. One suicide bomber hitting a power station or stealing a container of hot waste could single-handedly destroy a vast area. You think 9/11 was a disaster?
3 As a result, the technology requires a strong repressive state apparatus to protect it – whether from physical attack. theft of materials or leaks of information. Even in the most ideal democratic society, this represents a threat to civil liberty. In the average tyranny, it’s a licence for corruption and repression.
4 There are NO historical precedents for the existence of a stable society that can provide the level of protection necessary beyond a few centuries. Power stations produce materials with half-lives that put the whole of human society to shame. The time-scales are completely out of synch with human life-spans or the endurance of forms of social organisation. There is war and unrest throughout the planet. All sane projections are that social instabilities will get ever more extreme as the global population gets ever greater than the capacity of the planet to provide for it. It is head-in-the-sand-buryingly over-optimistic to assume that society x will be stable for the next few decades, let alone thousands of years.
5 Before we consider building more of these inherently dangerous power stations, we should have at least come to the limits of what can be achieved by cutting back on our insane wastefulness, making use of the available alternatives and developing technologies that aren’t so dangerous.
These soon might be new examination questions, at A level (university entrance) equivalent:
(Well, yes, I did make them up.)
A new McDonald’s “A Level” equivalent course has just been launched in the UK, fully accredited by the national academic qualifications body.
That’s certainly Egg McMuffin on the faces of us snooty Brits who used to mock the McDonald’s Hamburger University.
In fact, the McDonald’s Shift Supervisor qualification makes the other 2 newly-approved qualifications in rail track management and cabin crew tasks seem almost oppressively academic.
In any case, what about Burger King, who must have different organisational methods? Will there be a new national qualification developed for every brand of fast food? And what about coffee chains, ice cream parlours, noodle bars, supermarkets, convenience stores?
For how much longer will the public have to suffer the indignity of being served food products by people without certification? I don’t know about you, but I would feel so much more confident if I knew that the person who sells me a newspaper has an impressively framed nationally recognised certificate on their wall.