Expelled exposed

OK, you must have read about it by now. So here’s my contribution to getting the right Expelled to the top of the search rankings.

Nuff said.

Aah-ta!

While my son was having a bath the other day, we belatedly realised that a sound he has been making for a while – “aah-ta” – was his way of saying water. Duh!

Ever since, I’ve been pondering the mysteries of communication. Was this sound devoid of meaning, of information, before someone else started to understand it? Or is it enough for one person to intend something for some kind of signal to have meaning?

As far as I can tell, information is one of those concepts that, like money, becomes harder and harder to pin down the more you think about it. Wikipedia’s entry is certainly a confused mess.

This did make me think of Wittgenstein’s idea of a private language, but by this he meant something that could never be understood, not a poor attempt to communicate nor a poor ability to grasp a child’s meaning.

Qualified to lead?

After the GW Bush debacle, many of us in the reality-based community support the idea of a science debate for the USS presidential candidates (Science Debate 2008). But it seems to me this idea doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Would you be happy getting brain surgery from a lawyer? Do you want chief executives determining minimum wage levels? Would you trust a professional soldier to determine whether defence budgets should be cut in favour of education? Should religious nutters like Tony Blair be allowed to determine scienctific or economic policies?  

It seems utterly bizarre to me that democratic countries choose to elect as leaders people who completely lack any knowlegde or understanding of key subjects, from the importance of randomised controlled trials to the Cuban missile crisis. Civil servants from China to Britain have to undergo tough exams, yet their leaders can be pig-ignorant. Why do we tolerate this? It’s crazy.

It seems to me every democratic country should, with the help of its citizens, develop a curriculum for politicians, covering everything from science to medicine to economics to history. There could, for instance, be a basic test politicians have to pass simply to stand for election, and a more advanced examination for politicians to undergo before they can take office.

Of course, getting agreement on a curriculum will be a challenging task in itself. But that debate could be very interesting in itself, in exposing the often-ludicrous beliefs on which many people base their everyday decisions. Ideally, of course, we should aim to eliminate all beliefs in favour of educated guesses.

Making the iPod shuffle perfect

I like the iPod Shuffle. I especially like the fact that you can use it without ever having to look at it. When you spend a big part of your day dodging fellow commuters on busy trains and streets, you know how annoying it is when people bump into you because they’re staring at a mobile or iPod screen. As a music player, I really do prefer it to its bigger brethren, including the iPhone. 

That said, there are times when I would like to know what I’m listening to. And it seems to me there’s a simple way Apple or another software developer could make it happen: use Leopard’s built-in Text to Speech software to generate a short, small MP3 or AAC sound file naming the song title, artist and album for each track on the Shuffle. 

Ideally, it’d be good to be able to press some button combination to hear  this sound file when you want to know what you’re listening to. But it would be even simply to add the name, track and album speech file to the beginning or end of each track when songs are transferred to an iPod Shuffle. It wouldn’t be that difficult to do. Would it?

Natural breeding more dangerous than genetic engineering

OK, that title is slightly mischievous. When I say natural breeding, we’re not talking normal hot plant sex here, but something even hotter: bombarding the hapless veggies with gamma radiation to induce mutations.

It might not sound very natural to you and I, but according to regulators around the world, this counts as natural compared with genetic modification. If you induce a change by genetic engineering, you have to prove it’s safe. Do it by mutagenesis and no one cares.

Except a team in Portugal are now claiming that mutatagenesis results in more changes in gene expression (which genes are turned on or off) than genetic engineering. For greater changes read more potential to produce (more) toxic substances. After all, plants are primed to produce toxins to deter those that want to eat them.

In fact, history shows that even old-fashioned conventional breeding can be dangerous. The Lenape potato bred in the 1960s turned out to have dangerously high levels of solanine, the toxin found in all potatoes. The Magnum Bonum, an century-old breed from England reintroduced into Sweden in the 1990s, was similarly toxic. (“Old”; “traditional”; “natural”: gotta be good, hmm?)

The kiwi fruit bred in New Zealand from an inedible (but not toxic) Chinese berry and introduced to the US in the 1960s never underwent safety testing and caused allergic reactions in some people (recently shown to be due to a protein called actinidin). Hybrids between ordinary potatoes and related species have been found to produce a novel toxin not found in either parent called demissidine.

The list could go on and on. My point is not that genetic modification is wonderful but that we should be wary of everything we eat, however it was bred or created.

“Faith schools”

Many months ago, I signed a petition calling on the UK government to abolish faith schools. Tonight, I got an email telling me there was an official response.

Let’s start with the last line:

Many parents who are not members of a particular faith value the structured environment provided by schools with a religious character.

Now, why can’t state schools provide a “structured” environment? What is a structured environment anyway?

Parents like me want the best education for our children, and we’ll lie through our teeth about our beliefs to get it if we think the state-supported religious schools in our area are better than any others. I know lots of parents who have lied about their beliefs to get into such schools. I even know some people who have been asked to lie on their friends’ behalf.

Parents’ dishonesty has nothing to with any inherent superiority of faith schools, just the fact that these schools tend to have been around longer, have more money and, most of all, the pick of the best pupils.

It gets even worse:

Religious Education (RE) in all schools, including faith schools, is aimed at developing pupils’ knowledge, understanding and awareness of the major religions represented in the country. It encourages respect for those holding different beliefs and helps promote pupils’ moral, cultural and mental development.

I have no problem with teaching people about different religions. Teaching them to “respect” superstitious rubbish is another matter.

And the idea that “moral development” depends on learning about religion just makes me despair. We’re in real trouble if that’s true.

It get worse still:

In February 2006, the faith communities affirmed their support for the framework in a joint statement making it clear that all children should be given the opportunity to receive inclusive religious education, and that they are committed to making sure the framework is used in the development of religious education in all their schools and colleges.

Really? The faith communities support faith schools? Well I never.

They think children should be given the “opportunity” to receive religious education? Of course, they want the opportunity to spread their lies to impressionable young minds.

What is unbelievable, in this day and age, is that any government is sponsoring and supporting those lies, let alone the British government.

PZ Myers, I hope you’ll pick up on this on Pharyngula. You might think the US is behind Europe in terms of religion and evolution, but really, you’re way ahead of us in banning religion from state-sponsored education.

A load of shite

OK, I’m coming to this party very late but I can’t let this go. Some reality-challenged editor at the New Statesman published this rubbish about global warming having stopped in 1998, which, as usual, lots of people leapt upon in their desperation to avoid facing the truth.

Personally, I didn’t have to look beyond the byline to know the article isn’t worthy of anything other than scorn. The author was apparently known among his erstwhile colleagues at the BBC as David Shitehouse for his habit of writing seemingly great scoops that turn out to be utter rubbish, or very old news rehashed, or both. (The other British science journalist whose work also deserves instant dismissal is Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times. If he writes it, you can be confident it ain’t true.)

The reality is that the long-term temperature trend is very much on the up, despite the fact that we’re at the low point of the 11-year solar cycle, which means we’re receiving less heat from the Sun than usual. See here, here or here.

A cure for the common cold

The last couple of weeks have been miserable at times. My son got a particularly nasty cold, which he passed on to me (I’m sure you get a megadose of virus from babies) and which seems to last for a fortnight.

“The common cold”, of course, is really a description of a particular set of symptoms. These can be caused by some very different viruses, some of which have been identified only in the past few years. There are undoubtedly others which have yet to be identified.

The diversity of these viruses, and the ability of some of them to mutate so fast they can repeatedly evade our immune system, means there’s never going to be a single effective treatment or vaccine against the common cold anytime soon. And with so many more hosts for them to mutate in than ever before – six billion and counting – I do worry that more nasty strains will emerge than before.

I’ve sometimes wondered if there is a simple way to eliminate the common cold.

Imagine if we planned an Global Cold Elimination Fortnight or Month. Basically, everyone who could stay at home would have to stay at home for at least a couple of weeks. All non-essential flights, trains, cars, bicycles and pedestrians would be halted. Those who absolutely had to go in to work, at power stations or hospitals, say, would wear biosafety suits and undergo screening if rapid tests become available, or both. At the end of the period, rigorous measures would be put in place to identify any outbreaks and contain them.

Done properly, it could eliminate many if not all of the dozens of cold viruses circulating in the population. Of course, in time new cold-like viruses would appear as animal viruses jumped into humans, but this will happen anyway and could prevented by a swift and effective reaction. Think SARS. It might eliminate many other viruses as well, from the vomit and diarrhoea-fest that is Norfolk virus to flu strains (although flu is so common in birds it will inevitably jump back into humans).

Now of course I realise this is never going to happen, in our lifetimes at least. Too many parts of the world are in too much chaos for this to be organised even if the agreement and will was there. And the agreement would never be forthcoming. The waaa-why-can’t-I-want-to-do-whatever-I-want-to-do-and-fuck-everyone-else brigade would declare it a federalist plot by Washington and Brussels, as they do any attempt to coordinate a global response to common threats such as climate change. The imams would declare it a plot against Islam. The capitalists would call it a communist plot… you get the picture.

But it does make sense economically. I haven’t been able to find any reliable figures for days lost to colds per year per worker, but some put it as high as 7 sick days a year. Even if you assume the average is just two, stopping the world for a couple of weeks would pay for itself in just five years. OK, everyone staying home at the same time isn’t the same as sick days spread among the population and in time, but the figures are probably in the same ball park.

Baby geniuses?

This is what the researchers claim to have shown: 

Here we show that 6- and 10-month-old infants take into account an individual’s actions towards others in evaluating that individual as appealing or aversive: infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another

What they actually did was show babies a kind of puppet show and get them to pick a triangle or a square afterwards (apparently they varied the symbol/colour to rule out any effect from appearance alone but I haven’t checked the methods section myself). Call me sceptical, but I’m not convinced that picking a square or a triangle equates to preferring an “individual”.

I’d like to believe it’s true. But watching my own child hasn’t convinced me that such young children are capable of such sophistication. And while it’s undoubted true, as the researchers point out, that all social animals benefit from the ability to distinguish friend from foe, does it really help six-month-old babies?

I’m reserving judgement until the studies are repeated with humans rather than wooden symbols.

American Non-Thinker

I don’t know much about the site called American Thinker. What I do know is that if they publish pieces like this, by idiots like him, that a name change is clearly called for.

To spare you from damaging your brain by looking at this yourself, this is how the writer describes himself:

Sensible people don’t want to live in dangerous times. But solutions do not come from denial. They come from facing facts, thinking about them and taking proper actions. I am a scientist, writer and policy consultant.

And this is what he writes:

Unfortunately for [the International Herald Tribune], nobody has proven that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” on the real Planet Earth, as opposed to laboratory jars. So the IHT just smuggles in the inference with the scare words “greenhouse gas.

A scientist? I don’t think so. Facing facts? How much further from facing facts could you be?

The evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is overwhelming. Sure, it’s complicated. But people really should acquaint themselves with at least the basic facts before spouting such utter nonsense.