current affairs, environment, science, thoughts

A Question of Sandblasting

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There’s a lot of fuss around at the moment about the inconvenience being caused by a bit of Icelandic ash causing disruption to air travel.  There are, naturally two major schools of thought.

First.  Volcanic ash cases major problems with jet engines (see at least two near-miss major disasters in the 1980s).  Given that the ash is being blown across northern Europe, one of the most densely used pieces of air space in the world, we have to exercise real caution and ground flights.  We must not take the risk of anythinggoing wrong; after all we don’t want another Locherbie-style disaster (different cause, of course, but similar effect) and inconveniencing a few (hundred thousand) people.is better than the repercussions of killing a couple of plane loads.

Second.  The naysayers are of the belief that this is health and safety gone barmy.  They contend (seemingly on little evidence) that a disaster is unlikely and that the world economy cannot be held to ransom in this way by disruption that could last weeks (at best) by a load of risk-averse numpties.  In their favour there are reoprts that KLM have flown a plane through the ash cloud in Dutch air space without any damage (Lufthansa have also reportedly flown test flights); KLM are now pressing for the restrictions to be lifted.

As always there is a degree of logic on both sides.  How does one weigh the cost (monetary or otherwise) of the potential for a major disaster against the inconvenience of not flying?  This is hard and depends entirely on one’s underlying philosophical approach to life (see the last section of this).  I feel sure when the original “no fly” order was given the expectation was that the ash cloud would clear in a day or so.  Now it seems the disruption may last weeks, even months or years, depending on the course of the eruption.

Is the disruption of air travel over much of northern Europe viable (even justified) for a protracted period?  The powers that be seem to be working on the assumption that they have no option and that they have to be risk-averse.  The naysayers contend that such disruption is not justified.  Let’s look at some aspects of the disruption:

  1. There are large numbers of people, who are through no fault of their own, are in the wrong place.  They’re either on holiday or away from home on business and unable to return.  Or they are at home when they should be away on holiday, business or attending to family emergencies.  Some are managing to travel, and anyone on mainland Europe has a chance of travelling over land or sea – capacity permitting.  But anyone across the sea, eg. in the Canary Islands (as is at least one friend), in the Far East, the Americas or Africa is basically stuffed until air travel is resumed.  Clearly anyone who is away and cannot get home may have issues with employment, studies, animal welfare, supply of essential medicines etc.
  2. This naturally has a knock-on effect on business.  Business people can’t travel to/from where they (think they) need to be.  Is this a really justified concern?  I suggest that in these days of efficient audio- and video-confereceing this should not be a concern for a large number of businesses.  For the last several years before I retired I did almost no business travel despite running geographically spread teams – and I don’t just mean people spread across the UK; I regulalry worked with, managed or worked for people right across Europe, in South Africa, the USA, India and Australia without once leaving the UK!  What it does demand though is (a) more thought about organising teams and tasks, (b) reasonable telecomms and IT facilities, (c) most importantly a “can do” attitude on the part of those involved.  By reducing travel in this way organisations can save millions of (select currency of your choice); that’s millions a month for large companies (in 2005-ish just one sector of the company I used to work saved over $1m a month in travel).  Clearly there are jobs which cannot be done remotely: anything which requires specifically my bodily presence, for instance anything medical or where I (and not anyone else) have to handle a specific object; but the range is increasingly small.
  3. The third aspect is the disruption of trade – or at least that part of it which has to be done by air-freighting stuff around the globe. This of course includes food supplies and the postal service.  People are beginning to worry that we are going to run out of food.  While my feeling is that this is unlikely, I concede that our choice of food may be restricted somewhat with anything being air-freighted around the globe dropping off the market – prices will get too inflated to be viable or it won’t be possible to get the commodity from source to shop quickly enough. Indeed all prices may rise as a consequence of supply and demand.  Is this a bad thing?  Well clearly price rises are a bad thing, but beyond that it depends how one views food miles.  For my part I suggest the reduction of food miles is a good thing.

It’s a tough call, and one I’m very glad I don’t have to make.  Who would want to be the person responsible for either closing air space and risking such massive disruption or (perhaps worse) saying it’s OK to fly and then watching 100, 10, even just one, 747 fall out of the sky?  Undoubtedly there is no right answer, but I can’t help feeling I too would err on the side of caution.

So what of the long-term effects of all this?  Well the following seems at least plausible:

  1. There will be a permenant downturn in business travel, as businesses discover they can save lots of cash for a small investment in remote working.  Bad for the airlines; good for business generally and probably good for the work-life balance of many professionals.
  2. There will also be a further downturn in foreign holidays – at least where air travel is required.  Again bad for the airlines and the holiday companies; good for trail/ferry companies, the indigenous holiday sector and maybe even, longer-term, for heavy engineering like shipbuilding.
  3. Also there might, with luck, be a downturn in the amount of food we ship (specifically air-freight) around the world; either because we get used to doing without it, because it can’t be shipped fast enough or because Joe Public won’t pay the inflated prices.  Undoubtedly this will be bad for the producers and the airlines.  But it should be good for local farmers who might be encouraged to put land to better use and it could lead towards the much needed restructuring of world-wide agriculture (which I’ve written about before, see for example here and here).
  4. All of this leads to a long-term downturn in aviation with (if ones believes in it) a positive effect on climate change and probably several airlines going out of business.  

As one of my friends on Facebook has observed: “perhaps we need to get used to the fact that the modern ease of transporting ourselves [and our stuff – K] across continents is not something that should be taken for granted”.

And as a final thought: who can now justify the expansion of Heathrow, or indeed any other airport?

current affairs, environment

Join Airplot

An unusual piece of campaigning from me as in general I don’t actively promote specific campaigns.

Airplot is a small piece of land acquired by Greenpeace, in the village of Sipson, on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport. If Heathrow’s third runway goes ahead, both Airplot and Sipson would be destroyed. You can find more details of what Airplot is about here.

So far, an incredible 77,500 people have signed up as beneficial owners to Airplot, along with Greenpeace, Greenpeace, Emma Thompson, Alistair McGowan and Zac Goldsmith. The target is to reach 100,000 beneficial owners by 1st May. Being a beneficial owner costs nothing but makes life far more difficult if the land has to be aquired by the government (or its agents) to build Heathrow’s Third Runway.

If Heathrow expands, Sipson and the surrounding area (homes, farmland and jobs) would be completely destroyed and the airport would become the single biggest source of climate pollution in the country. Although the current government’s plans for Heathrow received a major setback in the courts last month (see here and here) the battle is not over; the project has to be completely scrapped.

If the incoming government on 6th May tries to restart the project, Greenpeace will continue challenging the proposals through the planning system and if necessary by peaceful direct action.

I signed up as a beneficial owner a long time ago because the Third Runway is something I feel very strongly against, both from an environmental standpoint and because I am far from convinced the suggested expansion of air transport capacity is required.

Will you also help the environment and support Londoners by becoming a beneficial owner: an Airplotter? There’s just three weeks left to do this; when the deeds are finalised on 1st May the names of all Airplotters will be included and everyone will be issued with a certificate of beneficial ownership.

Sign up here.

current affairs

The Truth is Out – or Maybe Not

Now I don’t normally buy the Daily Telegraph, but then I don’t normally buy a daily paper at all – it’s all just too “Meh” and tedious. But I broke with tradition yesterday as I had a hospital appointment and time to waste. And I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed; the general standard of journalism to interest me was, as expected, sadly lacking – I couldn’t even get a decent start on the crossword.

However the “Torygraph” did contain an absolutely scathing OpEd piece by Simon Heffer about the upcoming election and the usefulness (my word) of the main protagonist parties under the banner “The only thing you won’t hear in the next 30 days is the truth“.

Being the paper it is you would expect the piece to be anti-Labour, the ruling whatever-the-opposite-of-an-elite-is. And it was. And anti-Lib Dem. And it was. And pro-Tory. Was it heck as like. The Tories came in for a mauling as well. In fact the headline for the piece almost says it all; it is completed really only by the sub-head: “The parties’ cosy consensus will leave millions of voters effectively disenfranchised”. Let’s sum it up by saying that Heffer is not impressed. Not at all he isn’t. Try this …

[…] election campaigns are about assertion and not fact. Much of what you encounter in the next 30 days will be propaganda, and should be treated accordingly. Your intelligence will be insulted in a most insolent fashion. The truth will be kept from you on every possible occasion. Artifice will entirely overpower substance.

And that’s just the opening paragraph. Let’s read on …

The Labour Party has failed utterly in government. It has not merely wrecked the economy, with long-term consequences: it has taken a path of repairing the damage that will, through its emphasis on high taxes, borrowing and public spending, cause more harm before it does any good – if it does any good. It has also been derelict on matters of such significance as our schools, our universities, law and order, immigration and our Armed Forces. It lies about its record […]

Yet, despite this atrocity, the Conservative Party has, in the five years since its last debacle, done remarkably little to convince the public that it understands what is going on, let alone that it has any concept of how to make our country more prosperous, better run and generally happier […]

And the Liberal Democrats? They have a flexibility of principle that leaves even that of Mr Cameron standing; a record of opportunism and incompetence in local government (the only place they have had any power) that puts Mr Brown’s moral and intellectual inadequacies in the shade […]

Oh dear! And yet it gets worse …

All that is certain […] is that we shall end up being governed by a social democratic government of some sort […] because the likely programmes and conduct of another Labour or a new Conservative administration will be broadly social democratic. By that, I mean that the state will play a large role in the management of our country; there will [be] a strong redistributive element to policy; levelling down, whether through the education system or the welfare state, will continue. What this means is that a significant proportion of the electorate that wants none of these things will have been effectively disfranchised. [my emphasis] […]

For the frustration of the non-social democratic majority […] has only just begun. No one from the main parties will tell the truth about the need to sack hundreds of thousands of people on the public payroll in order to ensure we live within our means. Nobody will tell the truth about how lower taxes increase revenue, because there are too many cheap votes in bashing bankers who earn lots of money. Nobody will properly defend capitalism as an essential ingredient of a free society. Nobody will champion selective education, which gives such a chance in life to bright children from poor homes, and nobody will be truthful about the pointlessness of much university education.

Nobody will dare to be radical about the corrupt effects of the welfare state. Nobody will take the radical approach needed to counter the results of unlimited immigration. Above all […] nobody will confront the public with the realities of our membership of a European Union governed by the Treaty of Lisbon […]

All these things matter to people who are honest, hard-working, love their country, and seek only to be allowed to get on with their lives, undisturbed by the state, and to keep more of what they earn […]

And finally …

That still leaves the problem of how Britain will ever be run properly, whether by a tribal introvert who wishes to suffocate us with his “values”, or a PR spiv whose “big idea” is to appoint 5,000 commissars to assist the development of “communities”. There will be more absurdity yet.

As one of my friends on Facebook said the other day: in a month from now a different set of the wrong lizards will be running the country. After all, whatever they say and whatever they stand for, they’re all lizards and they’re all wrong. It’s called politics. Meh!

amusements, current affairs

Welcome to the Quinquennial Donkey Derby

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So at last they’re not only under starter’s orders but the race for the next parliament has begun. No more jostling at the starting tape, this is for earnest now. And already the mud-slinging has started, albeit in a muted way.

There’s an interesting 10 point guide from the BBC on what to watch for during the race. Watch the race with our indispensable guide …

It really matters this time. So we’re always told. Guess it does matter more this time given the fact that the country is bankrupt.  Or does it matter?  (See “policy” below.)

The TV debates will dominate. Yes, dominate the boredom, most like.

The internet will also dominate. Yes we’ll all die under a welter of email, SMS, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other such spheroids. That’s in addition to the usual sheaf of paper stuffed through our letterbox, less than nothing in the papers (no, not even fish & chips; nanny banned them, remember!) and extra drivel on the airwaves.

Slogans will matter less. Did they ever matter more? At all? Mind this could be true; the sound-bite may be less important because lots of people are learning to see through them.

Policy will matter more. Oh, really? You mean any of them have a clue what their policies are? Or how to implement them? And even if they do know, are one lot really much different from the others? Aren’t they all their to feather their own nests?

The battle of the wives. I hear the bottom of a large barrel being scraped. Or are they auditioning for “Sex and the City”? Or to replace Kim and Aggie? Or Nigella Lawson? Someone pass the bucket please.

It could get personal. Delete “could”; insert “will”.

The local factor. It never made much difference before; don’t see why it will now. We’re much more global now; much more knowing about what our masters (tell us) they’re up to. Seems to me that means there’ll be even more voting for the party rather than on local issues.

Lies will be told. This is probably the only certainty here. But wait …

Nobody knows the result. This should be a certainty too. But do fat ladies sing? Will anyone even know the result when the results are in? As the BBC says, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. My money’s on a hung parliament and nothing being able to be done for about 2 years until it all crumbles, by which time the country will be in even deeper doo-doo.

Goggles down for a full house!

environment, natural history, science

Ancient Woodland

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Original image “Magic in the Woods” by H2O Alchemist

One of the organisations to which I belong is the Woodland Trust, a charity devoted to the protection of  Britain’s ancient woodlands and the creation of new woodland.  The latest issue of their newsletter Broadleaf has an article on the importance of biodiversity especially as related to woodland.  It contains quotes from zoologist and wildlife presenter Chris Packham, who will be familiar to many in the UK from his TV appearances.  Here are some very edited snippets:

In December 2008, Natural England, the Government’s conservation agency, issued a stark warning […] “Large parts of England remain in biodiversity freefall and we are still witnessing alarming declines in species and habitats” […]

[This is not] news to […] Chris Packham […] “It doesn’t just mean rare species, like giant pandas, red squirrels or dormice; areas of high species diversity, such as rainforests or ancient woods; iconic creatures like lions and badgers; or economically important species, like cod. Biodiversity encompasses the diversity of all living things, from human beings to micro-organisms, the diversity of all the habitats in which they live and the genetic diversity of individuals within a species”.

Packham, who is excited by everything that slithers, slimes, scratches and stings, and thus counts hornets among his favourite animals, has a particular axe to grind about what some people call ‘pest species’. “If they exist in your community they do so because there’s a role for them to play […] And if you consider yourself someone who wants to promote biodiversity that has to include everything: pigeons, wasps, rats, the lot”.

He has no time either for those who complain loudly about sparrowhawks preying on garden songbirds. “Having sparrowhawks snatching blue tits from your feeder is a good thing […] sparrowhawks are at the top of the food chain and don’t exist unless there’s enough food around” […]

Biodiversity is a fundamental part of the Earth’s life-support system. It provides many basic natural services for humans, such as fresh water, fertile soil and clean air. It helps pollinate our flowers and crops, clean up our waste and put food [and drugs] on the table […]

“We need to think more broadly about biodiversity, and the simplest way is via healthy habitats […] Ancient woodland […] has more diversity than any other terrestrial habitat, and we should never forget that a third of all species that live on our native trees live on them when the trees are dead or dying”.

This largely reflects my own thoughts and beliefs.

I especially like the comment about sparrowhawks catching songbirds. As Noreen observes: “What are they supposed to do?  It’s not as if they can go to Sainsbury’s to buy a cheese sandwich for their lunch!”

I love too the comment on hornets. I meet this horror of buzzy, stingy things all too often: “We’ve got a lot of wasps. How do we get rid of them?” Unless you are life-threateningly allergic to wasp stings (as I know some, like my late mother-in-law, are) the answer is: “You don’t. Leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone. They are wonderful predators and without them we would be knee deep in caterpillars etc.”  I’ve actually seen a wasp catch a bumblebee on the wing; bring it down; snip off it’s wings, legs and head; and carry away the body as food for its larvae. That was worth seeing just for the sheer skill and frightening ruthlessness.  Wasps (and all this applies equally to hornets) are also brilliant at destroying dead wood: we have some 12 inch-ish diameter cedar logs by our pond; in a couple of years the local wasps have totally destroyed a couple of them; they use the chewed up wood as paper for nest-building.  It’s wonderful engineering and recycling!

Nature is red in tooth and claw, and we should cherish and celebrate that.  It’s what keeps us alive!

memes, personal, photography

4-4-10 Meme


4-4-10 Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

So here are this week’s 12 questions and answers:

1. In your opinion, which country produces the best wine? France
2. What is your current favourite song? Oh, for today, let’s choose the Moody Blues, “Nice to be Here”
3. How would you describe your sense of humour? Eccentric
4. Adidas or Nike? Neither
5. Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe? Neither have ever done anything for me
6. Lemon or lime? Today it’s lemon, but it’s marginal and depends what for
7. How many megapixels on your camera on your phone? No clue; don’t care; don’t use it; I have a camera!
8. What do you think God looks like? As he doesn’t exist he can’t look like anything – probably
9. Do you like Pirates of the Caribbean? Only if barbecued
10. What’s your favourite pasta? Seafood linguini
11. Apples or oranges? Apples
12. What is the best airline company? Whichever has magic carpets

1. Sarlat – Frankreich – Le Moyen-Âge – france, 2. Corfe Castle, 3. Winnebago DaVinci, 4. WILD DIVA, 5. We Can Do It!, 6. Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, But the fruit of the lemon is impossible to eat., 7. i don’t care., 8. righteous blasphemy, 9. Pirates of the Caribbean – HMS Interceptor makes way under a Full Moon, 10. Linguini Pescatore, 11. Clouds in my apple, 12. magic carpet ride

As always the photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys

beliefs, medical, nudism, science, thoughts

Air Baths

Thinking yesterday about nudism, I recalled some connection with the great American statesman, scientist, diplomat and thinker Benjamin Franklin.  And indeed it is so for Franklin was in the habit of taking a daily “air bath”, as he called it.  Almost 250 years ago on 28 July 1768, when in London, Franklin writes to the French physician, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg:

I greatly approve the epithet which you give, in your letter of the 8th of June, to the new method of treating the small-pox, which you call the tonic or bracing. method; I will take occasion from it to mention a practice to which I have accustomed myself. You know the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and, if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night’s rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined. I find no ill consequences whatever resulting from it, and that at least it does not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute much to its preservation. I shall therefore call it for the future a bracing or tonic bath.

Elsewhere Franklin also writes:

In summer-nights, when I court sleep in vain I often get up and sit at the open window or at the foot of my bed, stark-naked for a quarter of an hour. That simple expedient removes the difficulty (whatever its cause), and upon returning to bed I can generally rely upon getting two or three hours of most refreshing sleep.

Let us remember too that Franklin was no mean inventor.  Amongst other things he gave us: bifocals, the flexible urinary catheter, the lightning conductor, an especially efficient design of wood-burning stove, the odometer, America’s first public library as well as hugely increasing our understanding of electricity and mapping the Gulf Stream.  And as if that wasn’t enough he was one of the founding fathers of the United States.

Who would doubt the wisdom of such a man?

memes, personal

ABC of Me

I found this one ages ago and keep meaning to do it.  So at last here is an ABC of me …

Age: 59
Bed: King size; if the bedroom was bigger we’d probably have a bigger bed
Chore you hate: all of them except cooking
Dog’s name: Sue; went to the great kennel in the sky 40 years ago
Essential start your day item: Tea
Favourite colours: Red, yellow, green
Gold or Silver: Silver; it’s a pity is is so soft
Height: 1.8m
Instruments you [wish you could] play: I always fancied the trombone, or something odd like a serpent, or a jazz-style double bass
Job title: Resident Idiot
Kids: None; phew!
Living arrangements: A house that looks like a jumble sale
Mom’s name: Dora
Nicknames: None that I’ll admit to 😉
Overnight hospital stay other than birth: Not many, actually: sleep clinic a couple of times, appendectomy, sinus operation
Pet Peeve: Politicians and the religious
Quote from a movie and/or book: “It’ll pass, Sir, like other days in the Army” [Anthony Powell; The Soldier’s Art]
Right or left handed: Right and only right
Siblings: None
Time you wake up: 0630 hrs on swimming days
Underwear: Boxers, when I have to; nothing if I’m at home or wearing shorts
Vegetable you dislike: Sweetcorn
Ways you run late: Travel delays are about the only thing which ever makes me late
X-rays you’ve had: Mostly dental; but there have been others: sinuses, bowel, kidneys, foot
Yummy food you make: Curry
Zodiac sign: Capricorn

Make of that what you will.

beliefs, science, thoughts

Hume's Guillotine

Astrophysicist Sean Carroll, over at Cosmic Variance, wrote an interesting piece on moral philosophy a few days ago. Carroll was reviewing/commenting on a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk by Sam Harris in which, according to Carroll “he [Harris] claims that science can tell us what to value, or how to be moral”.

Now I’m not concerned with the actual content of Harris’s talk, nor the arguments subsequent upon Carroll’s comments, which you can find in the links from here and here.

My concern is to highlight the interesting proposition in moral philosphy that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. This appears to have been first discussed by philosopher David Hume around 1739 and has become known as Hume’s Guillotine. Wikipedia quotes book III, part I, section I of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

In case you didn’t follow that (yep, I struggled too!), here’s Carroll’s version from the final paragraphs of his Cosmic Variance piece (remember he’s commenting on Harris’s talk):

In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected – and indeed, may even be hindered – by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true […]

The unfortunate part of this is that Harris says a lot of true and interesting things, and threatens to undermine the power of his argument by insisting on the objectivity of moral judgments. There are not objective moral truths (where “objective” means “existing independently of human invention”), but there are real human beings with complex sets of preferences. What we call “morality” is an outgrowth of the interplay of those preferences with the world around us, and in particular with other human beings. The project of moral philosophy is to make sense of our preferences, to try to make them logically consistent, to reconcile them with the preferences of others and the realities of our environments, and to discover how to fulfill them most efficiently. Science can be extremely helpful, even crucial, in that task. We live in a universe governed by natural laws, and it makes all the sense in the world to think that a clear understanding of those laws will be useful in helping us live our lives […] When Harris talks about how people can reach different states of happiness, or how societies can become more successful, the relevance of science to these goals is absolutely real and worth stressing.

Which is why it’s a shame to get the whole thing off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts. When people share values, facts can be very helpful to them in advancing their goals. But when they don’t share values, there’s no way to show that one of the parties is “objectively wrong”. And when you start thinking that there is, a whole set of dangerous mistakes begins to threaten. It’s okay to admit that values can’t be derived from facts […]

All of which seems about right to me; as is the corollary: you can’t derive an “is” from an “ought”, or in words of Flannery O’Connor “the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it”.