Category Archives: science

current affairs, science

Good News Day

In its own little way today is a good news day …

First I noticed that yesterday the International Telecommunication Union have been unable to agree the change to abandon leap seconds (see my post here) and a decision has been postponed until at least 2015. Hopefully that will give some time for sense to prevail.

Then today it has been announced that the parliamentary bill to move the UK’s clocks forward an hour permanently (well for a three year trial) has run out of time and is now unlikely to happen. (See my much earlier post about GMT here.)

But perhaps best of all, courtesy of Facebook and YouTube, I learn that one of my “heroes”, the most excellent Dr Alice Roberts has just been appointed as Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. While this has to be a loss for the medical profession it is a brilliant appointment which is well deserved. There’s nothing on the news channels yet, but I’m sure there will be. Alice joins an illustrious band of UK scientists including, inter alia, (the much hated by me) Richard Dawkins, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and physicist Jim Al-Khalili who all hold/have held Chairs in the Public Engagement or Understanding of Science.

Time to crack open … a mug of tea! 🙂

amusements, medical, science

You've Got What?!?!?!

One of my less endearing qualities is a lay-scientist’s interest in emerging infectious diseases (of plants and animals). And as such I follow ProMED which disseminates reports of these things from around the world to the scientific community.

And are there some strange and amusingly named diseases out there. So I was amused, but not surprised, this morning to see a report of Wobbly Possum Disease in New Zealand. If you wrote it in a novel, or indeed a comedy script, no-one would believe it! But what would you call a disease which makes possums, well, wobbly?

Others that always amuse me for their names are Astrakhan Spotted Fever (which affects humans), Flaccid Trunk Disease (of elephants), Lime Witches’ Broom Phytoplasma (affecting citrus trees) and O’nyong-nyong Fever (also affecting humans).

Yes, it’s a strange world we live in!

links, medical, photography, science

In Case You Missed It …

Links to a selection of the curious and interesting items you may have missed in the last week or so.

Do You Have Free Will? How can we know?

Heroes of the Hot Zone: pen portraits of some of the guys who are trying to clean up Fukushima.

Waterstones ditches apostrophe. English must be under threat when a bookshop ignores good grammar and makes it’s possessive Waterstones’s which is worse!

OK, here’s one for the mathematicians out there: 153 and narcissistic numbers. I want to know how they’ve proved what the biggest such number is.

Here are some seriously stunning 100 year old colour photographs of Russia (see right).

Difficult to work out here who is the madder: Amish men jailed over reflective triangle dispute.

Cats occasionally like all sorts of unsuitable things. Apparently some even like mushrooms.

And finally, just to prove it is worth goig to the gym … Scientists name rare horse fly after Beyonce “in honour of its impressive golden behind”.

history, science

My Heritage is Under Threat

Yet again those dastardly Jonnie Foreigners want to slaughter my heritage. This time they’re after destroying Greenwich Mean Time.

They’re not content that our stupid government want to move us onto European time (equivalent to Summer Time) — permanently an hour adrift from real “astronomical time”. Oh no!

Now the scientific community want to abandon good old GMT completely and replace it with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)**.


But wait! Isn’t UTC the same as GMT?

Well no, actually. Not as currently defined. Although it looks the same at the moment, the proposal appears to be to do away with leap seconds (of which there have been 24 in the last 40 years) which are inserted into UTC to help our electronic time keep track with the actual motion of the planet. Inserting leap seconds is a pain and a technical challenge, but not an insuperable challenge. But the proposal is in favour of apparent simplicity: to abandon leap seconds in favour of some currently undefined (and doubtless cocked up) solution in years to come when our modern atomic clocks have drifted too far from astronomical reality.

But surely GMT, when originally defined, did not have leap seconds defined? That’s true. Leap seconds weren’t invented until 1972, by which time GMT had been the universal time standard for almost 100 years.

So where’s the problem? Why can we not return to the original GMT, without leap seconds, if that is a scientific imperative?

Ah, now, that’s because GMT defines noon as the time the sun is exactly overhead at Greenwich. And in days of yore that was reset at regular intervals (daily?) so in effect GMT kept in track with every slight wobble in “astronomical time” automatically. But with atomic clocks that doesn’t happen. Time progresses regularly like, well, clockwork. And without leap seconds modern “electronic clock noon” (UTC) would drift away from “astronomical noon” (GMT) and that spells disaster for things like GPS.

So let’s just redefine GMT to be atomic clock time? But that would make it neither “mean time” nor “Greenwich time”, so it would be a misnomer. At least with a new name it is clear that the time being measured is different.

So … We have a working system which we are proposing to break. This is absurd. We should keep GMT (with leap seconds). It is a valuable part of our heritage. It tells people the history and science of measuring and recording time. Why are we throwing our history away so carelessly? Is nothing sacred?

** I’m sure the acronym for this should be “CUnT”.

environment, science

Bugger! We've Overcooked It!

This week’s New Scientist (dated 7 January) has a rather worrying article reviewing the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, 40 years on. (The article is behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it.)

The Limits to Growth was much reviled at the time for being far too pessimistic. But if the article is correct in it’s assertions then Limits was also pretty close to the truth and the chickens are now coming home to roost — probably before we have time to wake up and smell the coffee let alone finish building the chicken coop.

Very broadly Limits, and the article, support my contention that everything needs to be reorganised, reduced and managed — and unless we do so PDQ we’re doomed. But then it appears we may be doomed anyway.

Here are a few key extracts from the New Scientist article…

[S]imulations, far from showing growth continuing forever, or even levelling out, suggested that it was most likely that boom would be followed by bust: a sharp decline in industrial output, food production and population. In other words, the collapse of global civilisation.

[I]t is widely believed that Limits predicted collapse by 2000, yet in fact it made no such claim […] Now, with peak oil, climate change and the failure of conventional economics, there is a renewed interest.

World3 […] took what was known about the global population, industry and resources from 1900 to 1972 and used it to develop a set of equations describing how these parameters affected each other. Based on various adjustable assumptions, such as the amount of non-renewable resources, the model projected what would happen over the next century.

Assuming that business continued as usual, World3 projected that population and industry would grow exponentially at first. Eventually, however, growth would begin to slow and would soon stop altogether as resources grew scarce, pollution soared and food became limited […] [T]he human ecological footprint cannot continue to grow indefinitely.

If present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will he reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a sudden and rather uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity […]

More industrial output meant more money to spend on agriculture and healthcare, but also more pollution, which could damage health and food production […] [I]n the real world there are delays before limits are understood, institutions act or remedies take effect. These delayed responses were programmed […] The model crashed because its hypothetical people did not respond to the mounting problems before underlying support systems, such as farmland and ecosystems, had been damaged […] they carried on consuming and polluting past the point the model world could sustain.

[W]here growth of population and industry were constrained, growth did level out rather than collapse […]

In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy — which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials — and a doubling in the reserves of non-renewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reductions were added as well: this time, the crash came when there was no more farmland. Adding in higher farm yields and better birth control helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck […] Whatever the researchers did to eke out resources or stave off pollution, exponential growth was simply prolonged, until it eventually swamped the remedies. Only when the growth of population and industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise […]

[I]n 2008 […] a detailed statistical analysis of how real growth compares to the scenarios in Limits […] concluded that reality so far closely matches the standard run of World3.

Limits took account of the fact that birth rates fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected [but an] updated study using World3 in 2005 […] included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still collapsed.

Bit of a bummer really. But nothing that surprises me. Still it’s depressing if you believe it. And there seems to be little we can do about it at a personal level other than consume less, breed less, be much more eco-minded and keep shouting at those we invest with power. But that’s only any good if we all — or at least a large enough percentage of us — do it. And so far we seem to be emulating ostriches. Although maybe, just maybe, the current recession and international financial chaos might be the wake-up call and our saviour. I ain’t holding my breath though.

But then I likely won’t be around to see (the worst of) what’s to come. It’s the rest of you — our children’s and grand-children’s generations — I feel sorry for because it’s our and our parents’ generations who have buggered it up for you.

Bad karma all round. 🙁

science, thoughts

More on the Calendar

Following up on my post of a couple of days ago, I saw a further article in Wired about the proposed new Hanke-Henry Calendar.

What is interesting is that when I looked at this Wired article, they had a poll asking whether readers wanted to retain the existing Gregorian calendar or change to the HH version. To my surprise almost two-thirds for the almost 20,000 voting said they would prefer the new Hanke-Henry Calendar.

Hmmm … Maybe! I bet if we went there most of this support would vanish. Such, in my experience, is the way of people.

While I think the Hanke-Henry Calendar is interesting, and would probably support it, I continue to have two reservations.

Firstly, it starts the year (and therefore every week) on a Sunday which, as I mentioned before, is counter to the international standard on dates (ISO 8601) — but when did that ever matter to Americans? However this is really easily fixed by starting the year on a Monday, although that does mean the new calendar couldn’t be introduced until 2018 without moving the names of the days. I see no problem with a 2018 start date as that will give everyone time to adjust.

(Out of interest, using Henry & Hanke’s method Christmas Day would always be on a Sunday, whereas using my Monday method Christmas Day would always be on a Monday.)

Secondly, and more seriously, while Henry & Hanke do away with the annoyance of leap years and leap days, they have to introduce an alternative to ensure the calendar keeps roughly in line with solar time as the years pass. So they introduce the leap week — an extra week added at the end of the year every 5 or 6 years. That’s fine, but is it every five years, or every six? Actually it is some arcane combination; there is no good (read, easy for Joe Public) method for determining when to add the leap week.

According to the Wired article the leap week is “inserted into years starting or ending on a Gregorian-calendar Thursday” which “would almost perfectly account for Earth’s 365.2422 day-long orbit around the sun”. This is unutterable madness! Why base the leap weeks on the “old” calendar we’re replacing?

Currently there is a simple method for calculating what is a leap year. A method which Joe Public is capable of understanding. But the Hanke-Henry system would leave people with no clue as there is no simple pattern to what would be leap week years. How many people are going to keep track of the “old” calendar just to calculate leap week years? Answer: none! Within a few years people will have no clue when leap week years are (the calculation is arcane, to say the least), just as now almost no-one can calculate when Easter falls despite that it follows a simple rule.

But I reckon this too can be pretty well fixed with a simple algorithm. How about this? … In the new calendar every year is 364 days (52 seven day weeks), except when the year is divisible exactly by 5 when you add the leap week unless it is also a century or half-century year. So years 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 and so on would be leap week years; but not 2000, 2050, 2100, 2150 etc. According to my calculation that runs about as close as this calendar can to true, being just a couple of days out after 500 years. That’s about as good as you’re going to get given that with a 7 day leap week system the variations from true solar time can be up to a week or so. This way people will know very easily what are leap week years and what aren’t. No need to perpetuate the calendar we’ve tried to replace.

(Actually after 500 years the calendar is maybe lagging solar time by slightly too much, on average, so you might want to add back the leap week in 2500. But that is maybe a refinement too far at this stage.)

Now who would like to sort out the moveable feat known as Easter? Shall we just adopt the Pagan feasts?

freedom of speech, medical, science

Nanny State's Fatal Addiction

A few days ago the Heresy Corner blog wrote a piece exposing the worrying tendency of officialdom and do-gooders to slam down hard on things they don’t like (eg. smoking, alcohol) but with completely the wrong timing and emphasis. The writer shows that they did it with smoking and now they’re doing it with alcohol, and suggests that it is little more then self-defeating persecution. Consider the following extracts …

Alcohol consumption in the UK in fact peaked in 2004 and has been declining ever since. It’s now 11% lower than it was. There was an especially large fall in 2009. The UK ranks also below the European average in terms of consumption, an under-reported fact that may have something to do with Britain’s having the second-highest level of alcohol duty in the EU. The fall in consumption has been most dramatic among young people (the same is true of smoking) as a combination of draconian ID-checks (these days, you’re lucky to be sold a bottle of wine no questions asked if you’re under 40), rising prices and a media obsession with teenage drunkenness has made the traditional slow transition to the adult world of social drinking far more difficult to accomplish. This, of course, may help to explain why, when they finally are allowed to drink, so many young people seem unable to handle it.

As the harm reduces, so the zeal of the harm-reducers increases, as they focus all their energy and determination on ever-smaller numbers of the recalcitrant. At the same time, new targets come into their sights.

Two media organisations in particular enjoy scaring their audience with exaggerated levels of gloom. The Daily Mail and the BBC […] It’s not just alcohol and tobacco that regularly get this level of alarmist coverage. It’s also… illegal drugs, obesity, sex-trafficking, climate change, internet porn and the “sexualisation of childhood”.

Nanny statism, of course, is what happens when the government takes the regulation of morality away from bishops and gives it to doctors, social workers and professional experts.

I would actually say that this is what happens when you take the regulation of morality away from the people themselves. What happened to the personal responsibility that this government is supposedly such a believer in?

What is just as worrying, as is pointed out by Tim Worstall at Forbes is that the numbers upon which this alcohol policy are being built are themselves a complete fiction. As Worstall points out …

[W]hat drives political action is not the truth but what people believe to be the truth. So, if you can whip up a scare story about the ill effects […] then, as long as people believe you, you should be able to get some action taken […]

“Some 1,173,386 people in England were admitted to casualty for injuries or illnesses caused by drinking in 2010/11, compared with just 510,780 in 2002/3 […] The figures for last year represent an 11 per cent increase on the previous 12 months, when alcohol-related admissions stood at 1,056,962”

[…] there are two things odd about these numbers […] The first is that no one at all is measuring how many hospital admissions are as a result of alcohol. That’s just not what is done:

“It’s largely a function of methodology. Alcohol-related admissions are calculated in such a way that if you are unlucky enough, say, to be involved in a fire and admitted to hospital for the treatment of your burns, it will count as 0.38 of an alcohol-related admission — unless you happen to be under 15, when it won’t count at all.

“If you drown, it counts as 0.34 of an alcohol-related admission […] Getting chilled to the bone (accidental excessive cold) counts for 0.25 of an admission, intentional self-harm to 0.20 per cent of an admission.

“These fractions apply whether or not there was any evidence you had been drinking before these disasters befell you.”

So […] [w]e’re not in fact being told anything at all about the number of alcohol related hospital admissions. We’re being told about the numbers which are assumed to be alcohol related. And I think we can all see what the problem is here, can’t we? […]

Now, does all of this mean that there has been no rise in alcohol related diseases? I’ve no idea actually, but the point is that nor do you and nor do the people releasing these figures to us. The methods they’re using to compile the numbers, the things they’re not telling us about those numbers, mean that they lying to us with those numbers.

So basically the whole thing is a complete and utter lie from start to finish, and the numbers could be adjusted in the background to prove anything anyone wants. And politicians wonder why no-one believes nor trusts them. Would you?

So wither next? You’d better believe that these state-registered nanny do-gooders have their sights on all the “problem areas” mentioned above. Drugs have been a target for a long time; the heavy-handed mobsters must arrive soon. They’ve started on obesity already. And as for anything to do with sex, well we must ban that because, well, it’s just not nice is it?

Next we know they’ll be wanting to grant us licences to shag. Oh wait a minute. We have those already, it’s called marriage. It’s probably as well no-one takes blind bit of notice of that any more.

So be alert … your country needs lerts! Gawdelpus!

science, thoughts

New Year, New Calendar

Did you change your calendars yesterday for the bright new 2012 versions?

I bet you didn’t! At at least not to the overhauled calendar being advocated by Richard Henry and Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University in the USA, because the proposed Hanke-Henry Calendar is a bit radically different: it has a reformed pattern of two 30 day months followed by a 31 day month, four times a year. So the rhyme, “30 days hath September, April, June and November” would be revised to “30 days hath September, June, March and December”.

This means that every year would be composed of a regular 52 seven-day weeks, and every date will always fall on the same day of the week — like Christmas Day would always be, say, a Sunday. It gets rid of the silliness of leap years and of remembering how many days each moth has.

So who sees the problem? Surely if it was that easy it would have been done centuries ago.

Yes, that’s right the Hanke-Henry Calendar produces a year of just 364 days. Whereas the Earth year is 365.2422 days (hence our need for a leap day every four years to correct for that almost ¼ day error). So what do they do? Yes, that’s right! They impose not leap days, but leap weeks by adding an extra week to the end of December every 5 or 6 years. GOK how they’d cope with the moveability Easter!?

There’s another flaw, which the Scientific American article doesn’t pick up on. Hanke and Henry want their calendar to start with 1 January on a Sunday (as 2012 is, and which will next occur in 2017). The only problem is that the International Standard on dates (ISO 8601, and see also the Wikipedia entry) decrees that the week starts on a Monday and that week 1 of the year is the first week containing at least 4 days (which turns out to mean the week containing the first Thursday of the year). It’s that “week starts on a Monday” rule that is the killer. Thanks to 2012 being a Leap Year the next year when 1 January is a Monday is 2018. Hanke and Henry don’t want to wait that long! But it would give time for everyone to agree to the idea and get their ducks lined up.

It’s an interesting and actually quite a logical idea, but to be honest I cannot see it catching on. If we thought the brouhaha over Year 2000 was painful, this would be ten times worse as every date algorithm would have to be not just checked but actually changed. And in the 11 years since Year 2000 the electronic world has expanded ten-fold, maybe a hundred-fold, beyond what it was in 2000. Business would never stand for what would be a hugely complex change — although it might help the unemployment figures.

All those who’d like to try this calendar say “Aye”.

medical, science, sexuality

The Mufia

Yep, you read that right … the Mufia are out and about tomorrow.

Apparently tomorrow (Saturday 10/12) will see a “The Muff March against ‘designer vagina’ surgery” along Harley Street, London’s centre private medicine.

High time to stop the medicalisation of the normal!

amusements, links, natural history, science, sexuality

Links of the Week

This week’s collection of links to items you may have missed …

First off something scary. Just look at the size of this giant bug!

Not all critters are quite so scary … For instance, we know the crow family are highly intelligent, now Ravens have been shown to use ‘hand’ gestures to communicate.

But then who would have thought that there are cognitive benefits to chewing gum.

Now here’s a job that you never even dreamt existed, nor wanted … castrating sheep with teeth, which has been shown not to be a great idea!

Here is a list of ten of the most dangerous chemicals in the world. And to think I’ve worked with some of those, as well as a few which aren’t on that list!

Talking of dangerous, this one is really worrying … ‘End of virginity’ if women drive, Saudi cleric warns. WTF do these people think they are! Made me see red.

But then again the Egyptian authorities are clearly no better (and equally make me see red), prompting a young Egyptian woman to stand up for women’s rights and argue that modesty objectifies women. She reinforces this by appearing nude too. Two reports in a weblog here and this one from the Guardian. More power to her elbow. Let’s all hope for her safety.

Finally, for amusement, more on the vulva cupcakes. Maybe a new fashion statement?