Angels & Demons
Posted on May 21 2009 | Tagged as: RIBs (Reviews In Brief)
Two pounds of poo in a one-pound bag.
This ban on photographing the police could turn out to be fun
Posted on Feb 18 2009 | Tagged as: Just no
There’s this story in the Telegraph about soldiers being “banned” from social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. At the end an MoD spokesman says that it’s not an outright ban:
‘He said: “Of course soldiers are allowed to go on Facebook and contribute to blogs.
“But we need to ensure sensitive information is not inadvertently placed in the public domain. A routine instruction has merely been refreshed and reissued.”‘
This made me think of something. As of the other day, it became illegal to take photographs of police officers or members of the armed forces.
Specifically:
‘Under section 76, eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers which is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” will be an offence carrying a maximum jail term of 10 years.’
(Photographs were apparently included in case some terrorist or other decides to kidnap a policeman or soldier. You’d think it’d be easier just to hang around the pubs near an army base.)
So if a user of Facebook or Myspace identifies himself on the site as a soldier or police officer, and then uploads photos of himself, or if his friends do, they could well be breaking this law.
And what fun that could be.
Prayer is the opposite of treatment
Posted on Feb 04 2009 | Tagged as: Religion, The Stupid
Perhaps this notorious prayer-offering nurse should be suspended.
Not for “failing to show a commitment to equality and diversity”, but because prayer can be dangerous:
“Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
“And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.”
(Original study here.)
A nurse’s job is to help make patients better (insofar as that is possible). Risking making it worse is a fairly fundmental failing.
Kind of what “education” means, really…
Posted on Jan 30 2009 | Tagged as: Free-speech fundamentalism, Religion, The Stupid
“I don’t agree with everything he says, but that’s not the point,” said Capistrano Valley High graduate Erica Bashaw, 18, now a freshman at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “Can you tolerate someone saying something that you don’t agree with? Can you have a fiery debate about ideas? It scares me that that’s not acceptable.”
Amen.
Read the rest of that story at your own risk: it’s utterly ridiculous.
Black holes don’t suck
Posted on Jan 20 2009 | Tagged as: Science
To mark the 40th anniversary of The Italian Job, the Royal Society of Chemistry recently appealed for suggestions from the public on how to resolve the all-too-literal cliffhanger ending: how Michael Caine’s team could save both the gold and themselves.
They’ve flubbed up a bit in shortlisting1 this entry:
“Derek Miller, from Hampshire, suggested the construction of a particle accelerator to create a miniature black hole that would pull the gold towards the front of the bus”
It’s an incredibly common misconception that black holes suck in everything around them. They just don’t. Outside the event horizon they behave much the same as any other object with equivalent mass, and any miniature black hole would be tiny.
_ _ _
1 If indeed this was one of the shortlisted suggestions. It’s not entirely clear in the Telegraph story.
Fishy
Posted on Jan 16 2009 | Tagged as: Science, The Stupid
The idiots at Durham County Council have apparently failed to learn any lessons from their widely derided fish oil trials of a few years ago:
“Free fruit will be given to staff in Durham County Council in a bid to boost wellbeing and reduce sick days.
“For the next six months, 500 employees will take part in the study, the first of its kind in the UK.
“Half the participants will receive two free pieces of fruit a day while the control group will initially continue with their normal diet.”
That “control group” isn’t a control group. Without a third group given a placebo, the trial is utterly worthless. Durham County Council has been told this several times before, and can’t be bothered to listen, preferring to continue to waste time and money on non-experiments.
Why science
Posted on Jan 15 2009 | Tagged as: Science, Words
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to find someone’s managed to articulate exactly how we feel about something.
For me, this from Mark Lewney is one such moment:
“Without science, we’re as lost and scared as a Homo Erectus in a thunderstorm. Sure, science makes us all healthier and wealthier and all that. But to only ever ask what practical benefits science can bring is to live the life of an animal in clothes.
“Ultimately, science is important for the same reasons that music, freedom or love are important: to populate the dark, cold universe with amazing little beings which seek to do more with their brief existence than merely make it more comfortable, or less brief.
“Science provides natural explanations for your existence - a map which tells us where you are and what you are. If you don’t think such explanations are important, existence is probably wasted on you.”
More uneven than some of the pitches
Posted on Dec 12 2008 | Tagged as: Sport
Northern League Division One. Gotta love how some teams have played 14 games this season while others have played 21.
If only they had undersoil heating.
Lax
Posted on Dec 12 2008 | Tagged as: Bad reporting, Science
More slightly shoddy science reporting. From the Guardian:
“Thanks to German astronomers, we now have the most accurate measurements yet of the giant black hole that sits at the centre of our galaxy.
“And what a beast it is: as wide as Earth’s orbit around the sun and 4.3 million times more massive than our home star.”
Whoever did that calculation got it wrong.
The “size” of a black hole (really the size of its event horizon, the point of no return) is given by its Schwarzchild radius:
r = 2GM / c2
So a black hole 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun would have a Schwarzchild radius of around 13 million km, more than ten times smaller than the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
(Or a black hole as wide as Earth’s orbit would be around 50 million solar masses. But the one in the centre of our galaxy is the former case.)
One might almost expect this from most journalists, many of whom are borderline innumerate. Ian Sample has a science PhD.
We FOIing continue
Posted on Dec 06 2008 | Tagged as: Freedom of Information
The investigation into the (mis)handling of a Freedom of Information request that I first submitted to the Identity and Passport Service two weeks shy of a year ago continues.
The investigator at the Information Commissioner’s office has asked the Home Office to seek “further clarification” from me on my request.
Besides not being remotely impartial or independent, this comes after I already provided this clarification to the ICO on 8 October, after which the investigator claimed that her investigation would focus on whether the Home Office holds the information requested (which they claimed not to despite this actually being impossible).
Why further clarification should be needed is a mystery, particularly given that it was an astonishingly simple request: How many ways they know of in which it is possible to compromise the security of the planned National ID Card.
How is that difficult?