Category Archives: science

environment, photography, science, thoughts

Oceanic Truths

A short but very sharp posting from Sheril Kirshenbaum on Wired today points out what many of us already know …

Oceans are Totally F*cked


So what can we do about it? Well you’ll point out that what I do as an individual isn’t going to make a whole bunch of difference. Which is true if I’m the only one taking action. But if we all make changes then it will help bring pressure to bear where it hurts: big business!

So what do we do? It’s a complex problem and there is no simple answer. However the more of the following as you can do the better:

  1. Reduce your dependence on oil. Walk, don’t take the car. Don’t jet around the world on holiday, especially long haul. Fight against excess, especially plastic, packaging. Buy locally grown produce wherever you can to reduce food miles. You already know all these things make sense. And they all help the oceans.
    The less oil we use, the less is transported around the world in mega-tankers, which run on … yes … oil (often horrible crude bunker oil, at that). And the fewer environmentally damaging oil spills there are. And the less off-shore drilling there is. (Yes, that may mean nuclear power; but that’s an argument for another day.)
  2. Buy only fish which is farmed or sustainably caught and which is as locally produced as possible. We have to stop over-fishing. As well as reducing food miles.
  3. Reduce your garbage output. A vast amount of our garbage gets dumped at sea!
  4. Reduce your wastewater output; and clean up wastewater as much as possible. Yes, that means sewage, amongst other things. As with garbage it is scandalous the amount of dirty/polluted wastewater that gets dumped in the oceans.
  5. We also need to reduce agricultural run-off. That means reducing pesticide, herbicide and fertiliser use, and also preventing animal slurry getting into waterways. Which in turn means more sustainable land management. Going organic isn’t necessarily the whole, or even the right, answer; but it should help.
  6. If you’re an aquarist, don’t keep marine fish which haven’t been captive bred. Catching marine fish from the wild is extremely poorly regulated (unlike the trade in wild-caught freshwater Amazonian fishes). Fishing (for the aquatics trade and for food) does enormous damage to tropical reef environments because of the methods used.
  7. And anything else you can do to improve air quality and reduce climate change will help too. A large part of the problems the oceans face is from acidification, which is caused by pollutants and increased carbon dioxide levels. And if we can slow down climate warming, we’ll likely slow down the rate at which the polar ice caps are receding too.
  8. And finally, support marine nature reserves, conservation areas and scientific efforts to better understand the oceans and their biodiversity.

Notice, however I am not saying be totally organic, don’t eat fish, stop using a car or an aeroplane, and grow all your own food. Yes, it would be great (for the environment anyway) if we could do all these things. But let’s be realistic, it isn’t practical and it won’t happen. But we do have to reduce all the harmful things we do and the more you can do the better.

Some of you won’t think about any of this, and won’t bother with any of it, which morally I find inexcusable. But it’s your karma. Many will already be doing something. But which of us couldn’t do a bit more. It all helps. I at least would like there still to be an inhabitable world for your grandchildren. And I think I have a moral obligation to do something the help ensure there is.

beliefs, current affairs, medical, science, sexuality

Sex and Religion in Public Life

Jeana over at MySexProfessor writes an incisive post about why it is more important that we know about the religious lives of public figures than their sex lives — albeit the article is built on the words of one of my hate figures, Richard Dawkins. It isn’t that I disagree with the sentiments behind much of what Dawkins says (I don’t), but the bigoted and intransigent way in which he says it — he is just as fundamentalist as any of the religious believers against whom he rails.

As so often others have said what I think so much better than I can, so here are a couple of seminal extracts.

[O]ur society has so many hang-ups about sex that we’re practically responsible for creating an environment in which any sexual expression could potentially be deviant […] even fairly innocuous acts (which one could argue, taking pictures of one’s genitals counts as) are made out to be of huge significance because so many people are hung up on the idea that ANY sexual expression outside the norm is automatically inappropriate or gross or bad.
…
Dawkins asserts that it does matter what a public figure’s religious beliefs are, since those beliefs, far more than their sexual acts, may determine how they pursue public policy. He gives these examples: “[…] George Bush has publicly boasted that God told him to invade Iraq […] To push to an extreme, who would deny Congress’s right to ask whether a candidate for Secretary of Health is a Christian Scientist or a Jehovah’s Witness? Or take a Christian sect that fervently desires the Second Coming of Christ, and believes the key Revelation prophecies cannot be fulfilled without a Middle East Armageddon. Would you wish the nuclear button to be made available to a follower of such a creed?” This is scary stuff.
…
[W]e must grant people the dignity of privately pursuing things that oppose the sexual mainstream.** Just because a politician likes unconventional sex doesn’t mean they’re going to try to force it on everyone through legislation. Unfortunately […] politicians have done much to make anything that deviates from heterosexual monogamous reproductive sex a crime.

** And not just the sexual mainstream. People must have the right to deviate from and oppose mainstream thought and opinion on anything. For that is how opinions are changed, new ideas formed and progress made. But this doesn’t give anyone the right to force or attempt to force (violently or otherwise) their opinions on others.

music, people, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Hmmm … doesn’t seem to be much happening in general this week, and that includes fodder for “Quotes of the Week”, so here’s only a short selection entitled “The Way Things Are” …

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgements can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
[Richard Feynman quoted in Lawrence M Krauss, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science]

The Beatles music is really some of the best music we’ve had in the last century. Children continue to rediscover the music, generation after generation. It’s like saying why is Gershwin timeless? Their music is part of history, it will last forever.
[Sir George Martin, the Beatles record producer]

There are two descriptions of reality: either reality is the bulk of spacetime surrounded by the boundary, or reality is the area of the boundary. So which description is real? There is no way to answer that. We can either think of an object as an object in the bulk space or think of it as a complicated, scrambled collection of information on the boundary that surrounds it. Not both. One or the other.
[Leonard Susskind; Scientific American; July 2011]

beliefs, science

Speeding Lemons

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I came across a very curious thing yesterday. The way in which we associate qualities with things and thus develop intuitive beliefs.

As an example, look at these two shapes.

If I tell you one is called Bouba and the other Kiki, you can probably intuitively know which is which. Yes, that’s right, apparently the vast majority of people will agree that Kiki is the star-like one and Bouba the more blobby one. No-one can tell you why they think this, though, beyond statements like “Bouba goes more appropriately with that shape”.

Nor can anthropologists yet agree why this is so. Although it seems it is something to do with belief systems, and may have some relationship to synaesthesia — that peculiar trait where people associate colours with words or smells with sounds: Monday is always red; the note C# always smells of rubber.

Let’s try another one.

Is a lemon fast or slow?

It’s a curious, almost nonsensical, question. But think about it for a minute … and most people will intuitively conclude that lemons are fast.

And for me (I have no other data on this) it seems possible to intuitively rank citrus fruit by speed: grapefruit are faster than oranges but slower than lemons, while limes are faster than lemons.

WTF?!

Find out more about such intuitive beliefs and synaesthesia.

current affairs, medical, natural history, science

Foxy Magnetism

As one of those filial duties I pay for my mother’s subscription to BBC Wildlife magazine, and once she’s read it my mother passes the copies to me. So it was that last evening I was reading the May 2011 issue and came across this amazing report of foxes using the earth’s magnetic field. I hope I might be forgiven for reproducing the short news item here as it doesn’t otherwise appear to be online.

Magnetic foxes

Scientists reveal the otherworldly talents of red foxes.

The hunting skills of the red fox Vulpes vulpes are out of this world — literally. According to new work, this hunter taps into the cosmos to pinpoint prey.

The fox feeds mostly on small mammals such as mice and voles, and has a clever way of going about it. It often performs what is called mousing — leaping high into the air in an arc and landing on unsuspecting prey from above. Remarkably, it can pull this off in 1m-high grass (or, in winter, snow of that depth). It’s assumed that, under these conditions, the fox relies solely on hearing to locate its quarry.

But when a team led by Hynek Burda, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, scrutinised the hunting habits of wild foxes at various locations in the Czech Republic, they noted a peculiar trend: hunters tended to catch dinner most often when they were facing north. This was especially true if their prey was snuggled under vegetation or snow – the foxes then had a 75 per cent hit rate with north-facing strikes. Attacks in all other directions were mostly futile.

What’s so special about looking north? The researchers believe that the foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field to home in on prey.

Some other mammals, and also birds, are known to sense magnetic north — and some are thought to actually see it, when looking northward, as a bright (or dark) patch in their field of vision — a little like a sunspot in a camera lens — due to special receptors in their eyes. If foxes have this ability, they could use its fixed position to gauge their distance to prey.

Think of it as a circle of light from a headlamp aimed, say, 1m in front of your feet. No matter where you go, the circle is always 1m ahead. Thus, a northward-facing fox that has located prey with its hearing needs only to creep forward until that location is within the circle of light. At that point, it knows it’s exactly 1m away. All that’s left to do is pounce.

It’s the first evidence of an animal using the Earth’s magnetic field as a hunting tool.

Animal Magnetism
» This is the first case of an animal using the Earth’s magnetic field to judge distance rather than direction.
» Except for jump direction, no other factor — from an animal’s age/sex to the season, wind direction or time of day — affected the observed pattern.
» Animals that sense magnetic north probably also sense magnetic south to a degree. Indeed, 60 per cent of fruitful attacks that were not northward faced due south. Overall, 90 per cent were along the north-south axis.
» Cattle and deer tend to line up along the north-south axis – except near high-voltage power lines that disrupt the field.
» When foxes could see their prey they had success in all directions.

amusements, beliefs, current affairs, medical, personal, science, thoughts

Works of the Devil

Katyboo recently listed a number of things she considers the works of the Devil. And naturally this got me thinking, the way such things do. So here are a few more things which the Devil has sent as a pestilence upon us.

  • Top of the list has to be RELIGION. Now look all you religious people, you’re all Devil worshippers! If you didn’t believe in the Devil you wouldn’t need God to save you from him.
  • And then comes politics. Need I say more when one looks at workers of Devil like Tony B Liar and Gordon Brown.
  • Fast food: especially McDonalds and KFC (or as it’s know in this house Kentucky Fried Food Poisoning). As an adjunct we must include ready meals, and indeed all False Food.
  • Then there is a collection of actual food stuffs, which includes Egg Custard (yeuch!) and Jellied Eels (double yeuch!) and tinned sweetcorn. I love eel, but jellied, no, disgusting – salty and slimy.
  • And a few beverages, especially Pernod and Absinthe which are just vile. They even look like the works of the Devil as well as tasting disgusting.

What else should one add?

  • Hermetically sealed clam-shell packaging. Well you could make that all plastic packaging.
  • Night clothes, especially pyjamas. Haven’t worn anything in bed since I was a student apart from the odd occasions I’ve been in hospital. It’s just so uncomfortable.
  • Braces (suspenders to you Americans). Something else that’s vilely uncomfortable and looks stupid – if you need braces your trousers don’t fit properly.
  • And while we’re on clothes, there’s fashion. Pretentious and a waste of time and money.
  • Girls wearing far too much make-up (so that’s most of them!). Why do they need to look as if they’ve strayed a 2mm thick skin of plastic on their faces?
  • Facial pubic beards and pudenda (on both sexes) without them.
  • Ballroom Dancing. I refused to have anything to do with it as a youngster, despite my parents’ prediction I would be a social outcast. So I’m a social outcast: it’s probably for the best!
  • Maggots. Anything that smells nasty and wriggles. No more to say really!
  • Cinema and films. I just ask “Why?”. What is the point?
  • And finally there are a few people including Lord Winston (I remain convinced that IVF is the Devil’s work), Richard Dawkins (who is just as bigoted as the believers he objects to) plus most of the twats that fill our TV screens.

Oh, you’d better add daytime TV too!

Interesting. Reading back over that list it is very much a reflection of our theory about False Life. Worrying!

Image from 123RF Stock Photos.

beliefs, food+drink, people, quotes, science, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

Here’s this week’s selection of words that have caught my eye in the last week …

We’ve replaced the time we used to spend cooking food with watching people cook food on TV.
[Fiona Yeudall quoted in “Foodies: Are food crazies getting their just desserts?”, The Globe and Mail, 19 March 2011]


“No data yet,” he answered. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.”
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]

It is important to reflect on the kindness of others. Every aspect of our present well-being is due to others’ hard work. The buildings we live and work in, the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat, are all provided by others. None of them would exist but for the kindness of so many people unknown to us.
[Dalai Lama]

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]

I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.
[Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography]

If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.
[Bob Basso]

Marshall’s corollary to the last: If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.

freedom of speech, medical, science, sexuality

Male Circumcision

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I’ve blogged about the circumcision of male babies as being child abuse and mutilation before (see here).

There’s a useful article, supporting my point of view, on CNN from a day or so ago. It suggests that boy babies should not be circumcised but that the option be given to teenagers when the subject can give informed consent.

The comments I’ve read support the view that boy babies should not be circumcised; if parents/medics are not worried about hygiene than it is better to teach boys to wash their members properly.

As one might expect there is, of course, debate about how a teenage boy can make an informed decision until he has some significant sexual experience. And indeed I would agree with the view that you can’t make a proper decision without that sexual experience.

I would actually go further. How about we make circumcision (male and female) illegal until such time as the person can legally give informed consent – and in my book there would be no exceptions regardless of religious (or any other) considerations barring genuinely and immediate life-threatening medical conditions.