Tuesday, March 20, 2007

[modified mosquitoes] about to be unleashed on the ecosphere

One thing which has this blogger seething is the expression 'it's been scientifically proven', trotted out by laymen as some sort of clinching argument in any dispute, thereby elevating the 'scientist' to the status of an oracle, almost a god in himself.

People just don't get the big picture, do they?

Science is simply an attempt by
fallible, albeit well-read, humans to increasingly accurately explain natural phenomena, just as philosophers try to explain that which is beyond their ken. And every twenty years a new theory comes out and we all smile at an inviolable Stephen Hawking type truth now debunked.

What is vastly more worrying though is the attitude of science's empirical practitioners and their sycophantic worshippers the MSM. Here is an example from today's BBC:

A genetically-modified (GM) strain of malaria-resistant mosquito has been created that is better able to survive than disease-carrying insects and carries a gene that prevents infection by the malaria parasite.

One strategy for controlling the disease is to introduce the GM insects into wild populations in the hope that they will take over. The scientists also inserted the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP) into the transgenic mosquitoes which made their eyes glow green.

Oh brilliant. In the interests of malaria control and nothing more, swarms of virtually indestructable mutant mosquitoes with glowing green eyes are going to be released into the ecosphere and as details of the work by the US team which came up with this cunning idea appear in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" journal, then that's all right then, isn't it? If they say it's safe, it must be so, right?

Except there's no mention of further mutations now that the natural balance has been disturbed, no study of ecosystem ripple effects, no thought whatsoever beyond how clever these blinkered bozos have been.
Skynet here we come. Imhotep can now be unleashed.

The article goes on to mention 'modified mosquitoes' and that should also sound alarm bells in any rational mind - as if mosquitoes are some sort of personal stereo or new kitchen cabinet. This is the scientific community in a nutshell - the cold, dispassionate, impersonal reduction of living beings to components which can be experimented on, regardles of pain and suffering.

This 'insertion' of the green pigment into the mosquito. Think for a second about the process involved and the
Josef Mengele minds of the people doing it. And the way the BBC has embraced the cleverness, with the downside barely given column millimetres - the magnificent, illumined, humanistic perfection of Man's infinite capacity.

Man can do absolutely everything, he understands all and as a god unto himself, he feels he has the inalienable right to do as he deems to anyone or anything within his escalating grasp and consequences be damned - cleverness is vastly more admirable than integrity, after all.

Man is infallible and his high priests, the Scientists, are demanding their sacrifices.

[blogging test] put these in their correct order

In which order of importance should these activities be rated?

1] visiting other sites for interest but not to show you've been there;
2] visiting other sites and leaving comments to show you've been there;
3] attending to your comments section, answering what your commenters say;
4] creating interesting new posts;
5] increasing your stats through various schemes like RSS feeds and MyBlogLog;
6] just posting your point of view on something with no concern about who reads it.
7] other blog purpose.

[french tgv] are you willing to risk your life

For those who like to prostrate themselves before the great god Onwards and Upwards, the news of France's pursuit of the ever higher and faster will be a joyful event. For others who see other sorts of consequences flowing from such news - they will not be quite so overjoyed.

French officials have inaugurated a new high-speed train link, which will cut travel time between Paris and more than a dozen cities in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and north-east France. The train, TGV, will allow travellers to go from Paris to Reims in 45 minutes, and from Paris to Strasbourg, on the German border, in just two hours and 20 minutes. Under the old schedules, the trip to Strasbourg was nearly twice as long, at three hours and 50 minutes.

TGV stands for "train a grande vitesse," which literally means high-speed train. Tickets, reservations and timetables for the TGV East service will be available starting April 10 on raileurope.com. Trains on the line are expected to travel at speeds of up to 320 kmh, compared to a maximum of 300 kmh for current TGV trains.

Sorry but 300kph is just too damned fast for a train which goes round bends, no matter how great the magnetic hold or levitation. Fiddly little details like human and mechanical error are usually swamped or forgotten in the Eyes-on-the-Glory mindset which, after all, is a form of madness with a difference - it plays games with our lives.

Monday, March 19, 2007

[bobby sox] and don't forget poodle skirts

Girl in poodle skirt and bobby sox

Liz asks what bobby sox are. They're a bit before my time but this might help from Wiki:

Bobby soxer was a term coined in the
1940s to describe the overly zealous, usually teenage, fans of singer Frank Sinatra, who was the first singing teen idol. Typically, they would wear poodle skirts while rolling their socks down to ankle level.

Here is more about them. Frankie Avalon sang, in 1959/60:


When a girl changes from bobby sox to stockings
And she starts trading her baby toys for boys
When that once-shy little sleepyhead
Learns about love and its lilt
You can bet that the change
Is more than from cotton to silk.

If you haven't already reached for the paper bag, then what about penny loafers? Do you know what they were?

[happy monday] great day and great week - yo!

Sorry, Laze and Jem - a bit out of it yesterday but I see the incomparable Flying Rodent has flown in and left one on the blog [below this notice] and a good read on a gloomy Monday it is too.

If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of this worthy gent, I suggest you get yourselves over there right away - he has a Welshcakes
Sicily Scene type food post up right now - from Scotland!

Heavy day today but this evening I'll be once again making a pest of myself and the Blogfocus is on schedule for Wednesday evening. So, despite what we have on our hands this week, despite any negative vibes due to the grey skies, it's going to be a wonderful day and a good lunch.

Go to it rightly and may scallops rock yer tadger!

Sunday, March 18, 2007

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The PM

Always stirring the thinking processes, often left field, never incorrect factually, with an idiosyncratically challenging style, the Flying Rodent is one of the best going, especially when he dons combat gear and Rab C. Nesbitt footwear. Natch - that's why I invited him to blog this evening on a topic of his choice:

Evening all - James asked me to share some of my thoughts on a subject of my choosing, so I thought I'd bore the bollocks off you with an extended rant on nuclear deterrence.

It’s proved controversial, but I think that the Government should be congratulated for convincing Parliament to
vote for the new Trident nuclear defence* system. It’s extortionately expensive and completely useless, and Tony Blair managed to convince a majority of Parliamentarians to blow twenty billion pounds on it.

Jolly well done, sir. Truly, this man could sell tits to Hugh Hefner.

It’s just a little disappointing that we’re too polite to ever actually use it. I can’t really imagine any of our recent Prime Ministers ordering a massive thermonuclear strike on Moscow - they’d think it was terribly rude.

Actually, I tell a lie - I could envision Lady Thatcher ordering a strike on Moscow. Now that I come to think of it, I can easily imagine Mrs. T nuking French Guyana, just to annoy Jacques Chirac. At least now, with our shiny new missile system, we could theoretically do so.

That’s assuming the damn thing works, of course. Picture the scene - as the Iranian missiles shriek towards London, placid senior civil servants calmly explain to a panicked Prime Minister that our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work in desert conditions.

Still, nukes seem to be the weapon of choice as far as bloggers are concerned. Every time some crank in the Middle East burns a flag, I wind up reading feverish demands that we turn the entire region into a sheet of radioactive glass.

I can see why that might appeal to certain figures in the Bush administration. After all, it’d make prospecting for oil a lot easier - you’d just have to walk about looking down.

So if we can’t use these missiles, why don’t we take that twenty billion pounds and spend it on something we can use?

If they junked the Trident program and just handed every Briton their own big pointy stick, we’d have enough left over to buy a round and crisps for 55 million people.

I’d think better of New Labour come polling day, I can tell you.

In coming to this conclusion, I've had to consider what would happen to the concept of deterrence. The arms race would brutal, as countries competed to build ever larger and sharper sticks. I suppose that the worst case scenario is the Iranians developing a stick so big and pointy that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could lean out of his Tehran window and poke us all in the eyes.

I’ve considered that eventuality, and we’ll need to keep a secret weapon of near infinite destructive capabilities in reserve - Britain's enemies will have no response to the shock and awe of the sock and 8-Ball.





We should take great care to use this awesome power wisely.

Thank you for your kind attention - I’ve been Flying Rodent, and I’m
here all week.


*You can tell this is the British government we’re talking about - the Americans spell the word “defence” differently, and imbue it with a wildly different meaning.

[chinese junk rig] interface with the west

Left: western plastic fantastic; Right: western boat, Chinese rig

I've just been spending some time looking at the Chinese junk rig and how it is being finally adapted for western use after about 2000 years. As always in these situations, western men and women of pioneering spirit and open minds first took to it and ironed out the problems [for our minds] while going through a steep learning curve to undo decades of western thinking and to start thinking 'Chinese'.

The rig, with all its lines, checks and balances is so at odds with the slick, metal and plastic, dial-in-the-speed western mentality and I'd imagine it wouldn't cut much ice with the average hi-tech blogger. Quite frankly, it looks like a toddler's idea of a sail and yet the Chinese have been utilizing it for blue water sailing since the 2nd century Han Dynasty, so it must have something going for it.

Apparently it's perfect for blue water cruising and awful for racing and therein lies the difference between our frenetic, ever-updating psyche and hi-cost solutions and the Chinese simple materials, simple concept, efficiently working for the purpose for which it was designed.

There's a nice article by Brian Platt who tried to get it operating and now associations are springing up all over the net. To this blogger/sailor, it's slowly growing on him but it would be nice to see some more of the bugs ironed out first.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

[blogfocus saturday] some new faces this evening

No linked theme this evening - just some excellent blogging, including some new faces. Some have asked about my e-mailing policy now and I have to admit it's difficult with a list of over 100 but I hope to get back to it soon. Meanwhile, I'll inform those in the Focus and hope the others forgive me and still give it a look:

1 After my outburst over Blogger, it was clear I needed Dr. Michelle Tempest's services, so let me introduce her to those who've never seen 18 Doughty St. Here she stays awake long enough to give some good advice:

I am sure the BBC news came as no surprise to any parent, as they reported that "lack of sleep can impair many functions, including concentration and memory." It was reported in the latest edition of the US sleep journal that researchers found soldiers struggled to make snap decisions in emotionally charged situations after being deprived of sleep for two nights. The authors suggest this could be important for other professions, including doctors, who have broken sleep and need to make quick decisions in a crisis.

2 Forty seven years old and divorced - that's my kind of mate. Bag's at it again, scrutinizing the lucicrous carbon eco thingy:

There is even the obligatory carbon message. 'one-fifth of our carbon emissions are related to the production, processing, transport and storage of food.' Thus 15% of that is 3%. So they are saying 3% of our carbon emissions are wasted. Plus that makes some massive assumptions. The main one being that food waste is across the generators of the carbon equally. As before i find food waste is bread, veg, etc. all the inexpensive local stuff really. So as it's not been flown in from Swaziland or wherever it's carbon footprint is much less.

3 Not strictly a new blog but new to me and to many of my readers, the Lighthouse is crammed with intelligent and not so restrained comment, for example:

I'm a bit ambivalent about this postmodern usurpation of Western civilization. On the one hand it's thoroughly pernicious and all pervasive; it's undermining and destroying from within the type of society we hold dear. It acts as the 'new communism' in more ways than one. Droves of naive people only wish to see its benign, idealistic guise, unwilling to accept proof to the contrary: that multiculturalism is totalitarian in character, is against the individual, is anti-realism and collectivist.

Nine more bloggers here.

[teddy bear hospital] just create an illness first

Now here's a great idea:

The Medical Student Association in Iceland launched a project this week by opening a “Teddy Bear Hospital” in Reykjavík suburb Kópavogur with the aim of making children less frightened of doctors and hospital staff.

“Children can bring their teddies to us ... and we will use all the necessary equipment so the teddies can return to their home in good health,” Stefán Ágúst Hafsteinsson, one of the project’s organizers, told Fréttabladid. The Fruit Truck will offer children who visit the medical students with their teddies fresh fruit.

Wonder if it works with pollies? For example, new NHS junior doctors will be ready and waiting and all you have to do is 'create' an illness for Tony, Gordon or the Chipmunk, say anthrax or the bubonic plague, and the NHS will do the rest. After the funerals, the new PM and Deputy can have their turn.

Good game, yes? By the way, you have to be careful with those wild teddies. A teddy bear was implicated in 2,500 trout deaths not so long ago:

State officials [in New Hampshire] say a teddy bear that fell into a pool at a Fish and Game Department hatchery late last year clogged a drain. The clog blocked the flow of oxygen to the pool and suffocated the fish.

[the great live on] malcolm denzil marshall


Botham caught off Marshall

Born 18 April 1958, Pine, Bridgetown, Barbados;
Died 4 November 1999, Bridgetown, Barbados.

I was at the MCG one hot day in the summer of a year I can't recall. I saw Malcolm Denzel Marshall, ball in hand, stutter at the top of his run up then charge in at breakneck speed and at that characteristic angle then, at the last second, the arm whipped over and a blink of an eye later, two of the Aussie wickets were ricochetting across the turf.

Jaws dropped all round.

Later we found that behind this prodigious talent was one of the finest and most compassionate men this world is likely to see. He was short compared to Garner, Roberts and Holding but he truly was quick, and his most feared weapon, the sudden bouncer, had all batsman shuffling at the crease.

Able to create late swing due to his grip and strange action, he was gnawingly accurate as well. They couldn't get him away. His swing and cut with the ball and that subtle change of pace were further weapons in his armoury which lifted him to the realm of 'awesome'.

Ricie Richardson said of him: "He is a great thinker, he knows the game, he was able to analyse every single batsman and I would like to say that I think he's probably the greatest artiste that we would have produced."

Malcolm Marshall was reasonable as a batsman, with a nice style and he held up his end, particularly the day he batted with one hand against England after injury, allowing his partner his century. Clive Lloyd said that the key to Marshall was that he never gave less than 100% following in the footsteps of his own hero, Sir Garfield Sobers and the great man's New Zealand stint in 1972 was the knock which set him on the path upwards.

Marshall left the bravado on the sporting field and off-field was one of the most thoughtful, caring and laconic of men, stubborn, never panicking, greatly enjoying the cameraderie, the dispute, the banter, the fast bowler's union and he was wont to dish out the advice. Other bowlers learnt from him as he learnt from them, particularly the leg cutter from Dennis Lillee. He was no arrogant snob.

What many did not realize at the time was that he was one of the bravest too, suffering a debilitating disease which eventually took its toll.

Peter Short brought him to Hampshire and he didn't disappoint. Quite often a bit lackadaisical getting to the ground on time, this added to his mystique and there's the story of certain opposition tailenders meeting his car and offering to carry his bags if he'd go a bit easy on them that day.

Finally he slowed and runs began to be scored off him and that's when he increasingly resorted to subterfuge, as Lillee had done before him. In the end, of course, it all had to end but no one wishes to dwell on that. Enough to remember the awesome, jet black [and that's no insult] bowler from Barbados and supporter of charity in later years.

One of the few players the opposition loved just as much as his temamates, though not on-field of course, almost all would say: "Long live Malcolm Denzil Marshall."