Sunday, July 08, 2007
White is the New Green
Don't ask where that turned up from. But it is interesting: a reasoned argument which stands out in stark contrast to the ignorance and vagueness off the celebrities asked to say their piece about global warming.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
It wasn't like that in my day.....
How glad I am not to be a teacher any more:
The wreckage of the Education System
Spiked 10 May 2007. Emile May
Never mind by the time they leave school these kids will all be able to become model Police-people, finding the job perfectly understandable, what with all the form filling and computer-using they get so used to their teachers doing instead of teaching them.
Having started in my previous post to make Gordon Brown a Lenin (rather than the Stalin most claim), it is only a short step to suggesting the peasants (= teachers) revolt to take over their schools, running them to teacher rather than provide easy-read, groovy bar- and pie-chart statistics for ministers at their desks. It shouldn't be too difficult to do it all on the same day, so that all British State school teachers take over all schools on a given day, say for administrative convenience the beginning of term.
Headmasters, of course, to be locked up or shot without due process, Committees of Public Safety (er, Education) running the everyday business of ensuring pupils are taught something or other rather than used as fodder for social experiments.
Ahhhhh,(sighs nostalgically, not) I remember the text books I read, or half read on my post-graduate teacher training course, in particular one by a certain Olive Banks (Sociology), where she defines education in various ways including something to do with (loosely paraphrased) providing for the occupational/economic hierarchy. And a great philosophy of Education tome, The Logic of Education.
Teaching was always, axiomatically, about economics in that the product of the education system (mainly) went to work or higher education then work. You would need to study the history of the education system in this country over the last 150 years to grasp where things went wrong in the state sector, which clever little political theorists realised could be used to further the countries economic interests over those of the individuals going through the system - while millions of privately educated pupils were beneficiaries of a good solid and life enhancing education, and are to large part still are.
The evidence for this can be found in many areas including the retention of sport as an integral part of independent school life, whereas the sports ffields of the state schools have been largely sold off for housing development, a sort of digging for Britain de notre jour, except the spuds grown in the second war were marginally more useful and probably educational.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Mr. and Mrs. Brown
OR, The Elephant in the Room or The Blind Men and the Elephant
After watching Wajda's Danton a few decades ago, read an awful lot about the French Revolution. Developed a party game based on J.M. Thompson's Leaders of the French Revolution, selecting modern-day big-nobs in political world equivalent to the main characters. Recently, came a re-reading of Gubb's Lenin (a little bit of boning-up required for a script idea on Trotsky) and a web-based reading of the main players in the 1917 Revolution. Choosing modern-day analogues from both historical sets can be an instructive exercise.
Watching various TV programmes on Gordon Brown's Premiership, and part of a documentary on CH4 on how the Chinese government rides rough-shod over its own people in its quest for economic growth, my normal healthy cynicism rose to the fore once again. History, in this view, simply repeats itself right down to the same ever repeated appearance of amixtures of ideologues and chancers. Politicians have an overweening desire to get power which they say they need in order to help us, but their constant meddling rarely makes life better for us, as 10 years of Labour has proved.
In a flash came the image of Brown with the same mad revolutionary zeal as Lenin, who from the beginning corrupted the whole idea of transforming society by insisting to do so would require brutal methods. Saving the revolution - at the expense of millions of people who had no choice but to join in or accept what they were powerless to counter - became the overriding objective. Under Lenin's control the ideals of socialism were still-born. Convinced if they were not extremely brutal and super-organised (which in effect meant the development of the paranoid, arbitrary police state par excellence used as model by generations of other leaders from Honecker to Saddam to strings of Asian and African leaders) the forces of reaction would recover.
Brown is having his narrative written for him by the image makers since il n'a pas le truc of doing it for himself: the core notions are Honest and Authentic: "With a father like that he is man we can trust in a way we realised we could not Blair" { once he had lied willfully over Iraq to make sure we continue sharing American military nuclear technology. If we upset the U.S. too much they can withhold the delivery systems, or at least hint they could. Check the web for the details of our relationship with America over our nuclear deterrent.}
The other issue with Blair which made him go down in the polls to as little as 30 odd % was going down the same old colonial road (some old FO hand giving him a briefing on Iraq's history probably did it.....Churchill...Larence....Gertrude Bell....et al ) of ensuring we got the contracts Britain 'deserved' in the New Iraq (see defunct Baghdadskies for my views). Oil a given. We are frightened the Russians with their gas will have us by the short and curlies, so ensuring the best cruse in the region for the next decade or two means lying about going to war is o.k., not. Why the hell don't we pay Ghaddaffi to fill the Libyan desert with solar panels?
::
China today, with its corrupt and venal dictatorial elite running the country mostly for its own interests is only to be expected if one set of people pass to the reins of power to another over 70-odd years without let or hinderance. Taking into account the realities of human nature, this echoes much of post-revolutionary Russian political history. The miraculous economic progress in China within the dual model would have the Russian nomenclatura of the time of forced industrialisation marvelling. How possible,they would be puzzling, to create economic growth without forced labour (allowing for the fact that the Laogai still exist in China albeit in modified form) it down the peoples' throats at the point of a gun and the threat of imprisonment or death? Indeed, if you think of it the low-wage economy that even the Gordon Brown's of the world endorse are in reality a kind of slave labour even if they get to go home at night to moan about one more day working in that call centre and keeping the thoughts of suicide at bay by impromptu three-dayers in European capitals.
::
Brown is a socialist ideologue but one of the more modern type (Compare and contrast Socialist vs. Social Democrat) who talks the talk about various trendy ideas from across the Atlantic (Clinton is hovering around right now) but has for the last 10 years been the Maximum Leader taxer and spender in a way that even he recognises - within reach of the top job - is not the right image: he now is talking about the sort of society where people have a say, which might be called a truly socialist politics.
Though elected he has been the dictator of our destiny through financial decisions he makes without much reference to the people: a world in a bubble where he can, could, make wrong decisions and have years for the effects to show. Pretty comfortable. The ordinary guy, despite Brown's new promises to devolve power and decision making as prime Minister, such as ideas about how to spend money on health and education, will have little say nonetheless. It is impossible to be in charge and let other decide in a thoroughly democratic manner. Things would never get done.
There would be a way of devolving the freedom he hints at. That would be for the state to make it possible for individuals to have as much say in the economic process as the few movers and shakers in the wealth crating process. At its simplest this would be to make it possible for a man to have some real say in the market, rather than pretending he does. The mechanism would be to make it possible for a man to be able to live at a very low level without working in order for him to have some input into wage levels. As long as wages are determined top-down by a mechanism which forces men and women to go to work for wages which they are lower than they would chose to work for, they are not free. if they are not free economically whether to chose to work or not they will never be politically free.
Brown as Chancellor is one man making myriad decisions which effect our lives. As PM he wants it to be a more shared process, which shows he is covering his tracks pre-premiership, cleverly, by promising the consultation with his people which he did not bother with as Chancellor.
So who is he like? Lenin for sure. A Vladimir Illich de notre jour. And who of the leaders of the revolution? Robespierre? Sea-green incorruptible maybe, but he's still got a plan for us (a dream which cannot be realised as history has proved since it requires us, the people, to accept his vision of a socialist future within a fully-functioning system which amounts to no more that unfettered free-enterprise plus more and more add-on, unconnected social/socialist strictures of the medicine-will-do-you-good variety which the British people temperamentally do not like and historically have rarely accepted.
We mostly do not like Europe in much the same way as we do not like the Nanny State because it is a wishy-washy, airy-fairy socialist dream - albeit it of a Christian Socialist variety - not based on what humans really want or are capable of achieving: a system which we feel generally profound antipathy towards because it is top-down. What we hate is ever greater and more grandiose systems for extracting money from us to use for ever more pointless, often useless, social projects. Most, of whatever political persuasion, accept business needs to be more competitive. Everyone benefits from a healthy economy. But we are still not using the Euro! Brown, the one who held back with his 4 rules, is now to be in total charge. Is he suddenly going to forget the rules for entry into the European Exchange Mechanism because he is Maximum Leader and because it will give him the ultimate cache to be at the forefront of Europe by now allowing us to use Euros to buy our veg at the corner shop as well as as we do straight from the hole-in-the-wall in Spain?
::
Imagine the scene in a few months: the dour Scot Brown (Why doesn't he tried to be elected in his own parliament not the English one?), rugged, manly, no-nonsense, hyper-intelligent, going for his first audience with 'Mrs. Brown'. She takes to him quickly. She probably already rather likes him from what she has seen. She becomes enthralled like Queen Victoria became with the first Brown. She likes to talk to him in which she probably didn't with Blair who she almost certainly saw through as a careerist without any real principles (The Principle of Shifting principles?) except those of the benefits of power for an individual willing to do and say anything to get it.
Brown has said he is not interested in the appurtenances of power. Let's see what he likes by his actions. Let us not have him telling us ahead of time He will not be seduced by supreme power: no man alive has not been and Brown, for all his qualities, is no superman. Even he will almost certainly to be seen, like leaders before except the odd few rare greats, to suffer from Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Flying Spagetti Monster
Stumbled on Henderson's pretty good creation of the Parody religion, and kinda got to thinking. It would be easier for a new religion to overtake an older on that it would be for atheists to persuade the religious it might be a better world without religion at all. Then for that new all-powerful, many-adopted religion to be superseded by another, such that you can hardly catch you breath from reciting the new commandments before there is another set to learn.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Face recognition
Stumbled upon Cognitive Daily:
Casual faces: we can identify "mystery faces" just 6 pixels wide
which refers to a previous post:
Why we see faces when they are not really there (with poll)
which commends a 13 Feb 07 NYT article:
Faces, faces everywhere
I have an explanation (based on the way it is possible to see the picture clearer when squinting) but it just won't come into sentences! Another problem to examine- How you can sense/know you understand or can explain something but be unable to do so. My explanation is so clearly 'there' it is like feeling a poem is about to arrive and being determined not to distract the mind till it is down on paper.
Part of the explanation - which I twigged just now was to be through analogy - is here at the wiki:Pareidolia
Monday, February 26, 2007
What's your beef?
Under this heading I thought I might examine individual websites here and there in order to tease out what it is people think they gain by posting up to the web.
Here (almost at random, but in fact in the course of a surf to find out something about Compeed plasters!) someone uses his for a combination of how he is developing his website, personal opinions, work and life, and psychotherapy. it is designed like a traditional multi-page website (a hypertext, in effect).
Because I am not tech-savvy enough, I have ended up with a flat structure of individual weblogs dealing with different topics. I would prefer what he has got. And as is common now, a side bar which catalogues previous posts under tags. Blogger is now doing this in the new version, but one niggle: when you convert from old Blogger to new, you lose the side links and have to manually cut and paste the HTML from new to old. Not too onerous, but why can't the complete site be transferred?
One of the key ideas discussed in the social network theory circles is the idea of altruism. What you do with your website (say, weblog) is links and content. Though links might be seen as content too (link=someone else's content). A greater proportion of weblogs are circumspect than all revealing. Identities are hidden and personal stories are described with key elements left out.
When you come across a website which seems to give everything away such the of the Bonta family via Via negativa which includes where they live , with a map and photos Plummer's Hollow one is immediately sure they are selling something as much as telling us about themselves! Though in their case it is a subtle blend of the two.
The difference between Bonta and D4D is miniscule: D4D doesn't say what his name is, provide a photo or give his address. But that is when miniscule can be quite large.
Monday, December 18, 2006
What every teacher should know about coke (the fizzy drink)
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Doesn't it just make you sick ?
Sorry for the sardonic tone. This article has me apoplectic. How the NHS has been taken over in this fashion (or was it always like this but we were never informed before?) and made into some sort of screen to healthcare provision, rather than a health service provider, is beyond my comprehension. Though, to be honest, I just experienced the dilatoriness and plain down-right inefficiency of the hospital service at first hand in a reasonably serious instance which by its nature clears up pretty quick. No names no pack drill.
I blame in large part the person or committee of worthies (yes, I rememebr now - it was a way to pump up nurses pay ) who changed nursing to some sort of quasi-graduate profession by giving them 'degrees' in nursing rather than the original diplomas, SRN and SEN. I remember seeing a t.v. prog. years ago with nurses doing sociology lecturers in Newcastle I believe, and wondered what had happened. The sociology of the bedpan? Prof. Laurie Taylor, can you help us out here?
NHS centres 'rationing consultant visits'
Beezy Marsh, Health Correspondent, Telegraph, 15 October 2006
In my case on exit from the hospital ward, I had to make sure I had the canula removed from my arm before departure, and had the right drugs (in the end it was was left till I left: rather than brought to my bedside all calm, I was incandescent with rage when told as I departed the ward, entered the pharmacy and told it would take up to 2 hours to be doled out my prescription. I told them to ***** it and walked out without them.)
Although the reason I was in hospital was relatively straight forward and I expected that priority cases in casuality would be, well, prioritised, I did not expect to wait there for six and a half hours before being taken to a ward, have to call out for food and water and have the complete Acicident and Emergency Team turn around in silence to me as if i had said "I have the plague". Then grudgingly provive a sandwich and a drink. In actual fact, I had been administered a drug by my G,P. only days before which I learnt by assiduous web-research causes dehydration. So it was not a normal thirst: it was a raging thirst and was implicated in the onset of my condition another twice, once while I lay there, another asstood outside at one point desperately trying to ring people to let them know where I was on my mobile (getting someone to pay attention to you to lend you the house phone was quite difficult as the whole casualty department seemed to be swearing and shoutung and in a bubble of their own).
I always did have a jaundiced eye about the NHS from my days as a student when I did a long stint in a London hospital as a porter. Although there were pockets of decency and good work, in the main I saw the NHS as, in essence a giant, make-work programme. My view has only hardened over the years. This may be because I am rather exacting in my standards, seeing it the duty of someone in such a vital role in our lives actually to look as if they cared about caring for us. The level of ennui and self-centredness I came across showed how lax the system had become even nearly 40 years ago. Matron certainly did not keep it buzzing, even in those days.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Quangos: make-work by another name
This has always been a keen interest of mine because it represents the one the the core elements in political power: doshing out other people's money.
Taxpayers foot huge bill for 'quango state'
882 different bodies costing £124bn…Blair's quango state
Both by Robert Watts, The Sunday Telegraph, 24 Septemebr 2006
The Government's official definition of a quango is: "A body which has a role in the process of national government but is not a government department… and which accordingly operates at arm's length from ministers."
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Odeo: Coverville 234 (Bowie " America")
Odeo: coverville 227
Bowie: over an hour of classics
self-awareness in animals
Monday, August 21, 2006
Private Finance Initiate - Norfolk and Norwich Hospital - PPP
Well we've seen some more of the nitty gritty on how half-witted politicans have afound a trendy way of wasting taxpayers money in order to make it seem as if the government is borrowing less money. I thought Liam Halligan's Channe 4 Dispatches effort extremely efficacious.
A month or so ago I had the opportunity to have a decko at Norfolk and Norwich. My friend, as I wrote in a previous post, had a small outpatient op. arranged, so I popped him down and waited around while he was done. I soon noticed that although he went in through a main entrance, he turned right and right again into a mobile spliced onto the side of the main building which was obviously one of these privat set-ups, probably South African.
A wierd, funny and ironic thing: popping into the shop right next door to the mobile for a cooling icecream, the headline in the local newspaper on the till desk shouted up to me all bout the rake-off the P of the PFI had made and which the hospital was getting no share of. Halligan gave us the basics. They re-finance at a lower interest rate than first arranged and 'agreed', once the thing is set up, and collect the difference. In The N & N's case this was about £120 million. Plus the companies are off-shore and pay little or no taxes, to add insult to injury.
I would earnestly ask Norfolk people to consider making waves on this one since 120 mil. could built another hospital or keep the wages paid at N & N for many years. As it is the hospital management are sacking people already to make ends meet on their side of the deal.
If push comes to shove we will have to adopt a revolutionary style approach to this: over-running th hospital, setting up ad-hoc committees to run the place and tear up the PFI contract, kicking out their reperetatives and running it as the Norfolk people's Hospital. Of course, this will only work as long as the staff would be preapred to endure hardship. the govt. would soon manage to strangle the 'revolution' by cutting off the wages. But once people in Norfolk realise they could remove a part of their council tax to account for this shortfall, things would soon be on the up.
Sources:
Documentary slams private finace initiatve
A Conspiracy of silence on PFI, written by Halligan in the Telegraph, 13 August 2006
Warning over PFI hospital schemes, Guardian
Bill Totten's Weblog - post 10 May 2006 , " An Easter egg Hunt"
weblog: Andy Meyer: Brown's PFI timebomb
Wiki: Private Finance Initiatives
Blast from the past: Amey, What Can the Matter Be? From SocialistReview.org, 2002
Last refuge
When all else fails (you don't have an answer to Islamic fundamentalism or why Americans are so obesssed with Liberals (they're a bit unrealistic but quite harmless folk really...look at their Shadow Chanmcellor of the exchequer....oh you mean those sort of Liberals...well why don't you say so.... Commies), the booze is in short supply and you can't have sex, listen to music. It always works when reading is too much to bear.
I'm seriously thinking of a sub-wblog which posts some of the music I've come across. Norfolkskiesmusic.blogspot.com
It will mostly come from Odeo because it can be played immediately rather than downloading the MP3s.
After a morning session a small selection of what can be found :
Kel McKeown: Instructional Video
Indie Spanish stuff
Mellow Monday Show 18:
powered by ODEO
Of course you will need a decent set of speakers...don't stint at least £50 or more if you can afford it.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Flatrock.org
No, never heard of it either.
But there's an awful lot in it. Something for everyone
Check it out from the topics page at
flatrock.org.nz/topics/index.htm
Try this link :
Worldmapper
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Omega 3 - its everywhere now
I am not the only one to notice how many food packages are emblazoned in prominent lettering with the words Omega 3 . I was talking to a friend the other day who offered me one of his very nice coffees. As I added milk to my cup from the plastic bottle I saw it on the side: "Omega 3" in large slanting letters. I remarked that milk always contained Omega 3, and that it had been there since the beginning of cows. And, what they weren't telling you was that it also contained Omega 6 which is is said our diet already provides plenty of.
Omega 3 is used as a selling point because it is on of the HDLs. While it is often not clear whether O6 is a goodie or a baddie from the popularising articles, this sort of report from The Australian (22 June 2006),Depression link to low fish intake, does at least show that the O3/O6 balence in our diet is a problem.
This Google search has enough to keep anyone interested occupied for hours sorting and sifting fact from fantasy.
But it might be worth adding a few other facts which I gleaned from The Sunday Times March 23 2003, which ran a supplement, Heart Health: All you need to know to beat the cholesterol time bomb.:
* Cholesterol is mainly made in the liver from a variety of foods., but mostly by those containing saturated fats., such as beef, lamb, pork, butter and lard. Cholesterol is vital as it strengthens cell walls and membranes throughtout the body, as well as helping to make bile and some hormones.
** To carry out essential maintenance and repair work, cholesterol attaches itslef to special proteins in the blood to form lipoproteins. It then moves freely around the body in lipoprotein particles.
*** There are two main types of lipoproteins: LDL, known as 'bad' cholesterol and HDL, known as 'good'. HDL is thought to be protective and one theory suggests it strips cholesterol from the artieries and tranports it back to the liver for disposal.
**** When the body had too much LDL, instead of maintaining cells, surplus fat builds up on the walls of the arteries that supply the heart and brain forming plaque, which narrows the arteries and can lead to heart attacks, strokes and angina.
***** There are multiple risk factors implicated in coronary heart disease (CHD) - age, cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, family history - but the greatest is cholesterol.
There are hundreds if not thousands of webpages on what essential fatty acids are. This is just one, but seems to cover it pretty comprehensively: Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs) for Your Health
You don't habve to use fish supplements, plain old linseed oil, used on cricket bats, sold as flax oil, can have 45% O3, 14% O6 and 17 % O9. Anyone know whether O9 is good or bad ?
Batty?
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Dave's got Wind!
well, no. But he would like to for personal and political purposes:
BBC man's wife leads objectors to Conservative leader's plans
A friend recently gave me a teelgraph cutting on the Wind Problem: whether to have it or not.
Its here under Bricks and Mortar:
Reader asks:
I am trying to find a wind turbine for my house, which is on a windy hill facing the sea, and want to generate power but without the eyesore. I am looking for something that has a vertical axis - like a large oil drum with spinning vanes. Is there such a thing or do I have to have blades on top of a pole?
The Answer David Snell pretty much covers it.
Perhaps david should pay for one to be placed at the bottom of some friend's garden in the country and do a deal about the electricity produced? There are many choices: he could let the guy use the few kilowatts produced and ask him to send a cheque for the cost. The electricity generated could be sent straight to the national grid.
Though I will probably vote Tory for tactical reason to remove simulcrums Blair and Brown and their fat cat friends, I will write a lot of emails to dave between now and the elctrions telling him under no cisrcumstances to put up that silly thing in the middle of London where there is little wind except of the arsical or verbal kind, mostly issuing from people trying to sell you something or other material or ideological.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Oh no it isn't !
Sunday, June 11, 2006
It's your job to fight the yobs, Reid tells public
John Reid, the Telegraph reports, expects us to "stop moaning and take action ". He will now receive hundreds if not thousands of reports by individuals who have done just that and ended up no better off and with the Police nit-picking about the methods used by members of the public to achieve the desired result. I remember once going ballistic because of tanuts as I got into my car and after sevewral weeks a Police report which concentrated on all the in correct ways I had gone about dealing with the yobs, while nothing at all on the accusations I had made. The method of clearing up the problem (i.e. not getting to the paperwork stage) seemed to be to attack the complainant rather the the source of the trouble.
The biggest issue for people is low level nuisance. And that in essence of young 'uns gather on street corners. If this was for 10 minutes most would accept it. However, they tend to stay all day with the attendance noise, mess, and intent to irritate, intimidate or harass anyone within reach. This can involve such very annoying things as making it difficult to drive you car past them by refusing to get up off the road on which they might be lying, or the bog standard soto voce insults or jibs to anyone passing which seem to be part of in-group bonding.
When the Anti-Social behaviour Act came out in 2003, I perused it with due diligence, hoping this would mean more coppers would appear in our village to disperse the usual suspects and keep an eye on what they were up to. In the old days the booby knew the kids and talked to them on his rounds.he had uptodate intelligence on what was going on, and who was up to no good. Now it is all procactivity. A car patrols - if you are lucky, or because you have harassed your local station with requests fora visit - the police stay in their cars, then a few minutes later they depart.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
All going mad - just some doing it quicker than others
Free NHS of politics, says top doctor
Is pretty much the sort of idea I espouse. It would never be implemented simply because of all the vestedly interested who would stand to lose through this sort of set up. I had thought a kind of national franchise could operate, the rules as to how to operate laid down in terms of standards expected, then each area allowed to get on with it. However, once a bureacracy exists it is very difficult to to remove the functionary mentality or indeed to remove the bureacracy itself.
Notice over the years how the main problem with the NHS has been jobs and conditions (the large unions involved) rather than patient care. That is what defines a bureacrcy: the function for which an organisation was set up being subsumed to maintaining the organisation itself.
::
Explosive illness?
I would have thought that's merely the epoge of the me society: the suicide terrorists might be better classified under this category.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Trust
My first visit to this new hospital, albeit delivering a friend for an op., gave me an long-for opportunity to snoop around. It is a bright and clean place, with layed-out garden and a fish-filled pond. But it is hell to get around. Once you have been there a few times, easier perhaps. I got the hang of it thesection of the maze I needed by retracing my steps a few times during the course of my wait, which lasted for about five hours. But as I said to my post-op., sore friend when he came out of the day clinic, the architectural team who designed the place must surely have hanged themself en masse when they realised the balls-up they had made of what was a standard design task. I challenge someone to do some video-ing of people movement around the place to demonstrate what an unnecessary warren it is. I'd bloody do it myself if I had a movie camera. Come on Anglia News and BBC Regional, fingers out.
Walking in the Plaza in the sunshine at the front of the hospital, people to-ing and fro-ing as if sautering across St. Mark's on a quick Venice break, I noticed there was a substantial and permantent-looking large white mobile, with a six foot fence around it, stuck on the outside of the Sir Arthur South Clinic where my friend was having his operation. Afterwards I taunted him with jibs along the lines of did your surgeon have a n accent a bit like P W Botha?" The "mobile" clinic/theatre is next to the shop inside one of a pair of rotundas one at each side of the building (the other holds a coffee shop).The name: Guardianhealth.co.uk, neatly stencilled on the top. As I was browsing the shop which had a wide variety of items including some gardening books on how to grow bonsais which caught my attention, I saw a local paper with the headlines "Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Trust...Scandal" on the cashiers desk. The few words I manged to read before having to move on concerned the business of a 700 bed hosital now housing over a 1000 patients.
My thoughts on what I had seen overall were pretty much what I had had before seeing the place and based soley on what I had read and seen on TV: that at all costs the health service must not be privatised by the back door. I do not think this from some sort of socialist principle. I don't see the poit od the edication system being under state control for example: most do nbot want to be educated in the way I understand it, so why not let them chose if thy want it or not. But health, water, the environment should all be government run.
In the case of the N & N well described by Bill Totten and any other PFI, we have the power to invoke laws which revoke the contracts and take our money back. This sort of talk is always poopoo-ed by the grisled experts (many who are earning a god living as eiher consultants or academics by so doing) in the various associated fields, but it could be done. The state took control of industries and then gave up ownership before.
Barclays in NHS rip-off scandal
Robert Lea, Evening Standard, 3 May 2006lays out what the problem is. It is not beyond the collective brains of the British nation to work out an answer to this and nip this privatisation bonanza/gold-rush idiocy in the bud. We now have the propect of a Conservative government which, paradoxically to many, would have a better mindset to carry out the necessary radical changes to put this in order before chaos ensues.
Principle no. 1 "No individual should get rich at the expense of people's health".
other sources:
An Easter Egg Hunt George Monbiot 9 May 2006 in Znet
Thirty-fifth report: The refinancing of the Norfolk and Norwich PFI Hospital (HC 694)
Public Accounts Committee 2 May 2006
Norfolk and Norwich shelves iSoft PAS
Buy now pay later (a lot more, a lot later) By Ross Clark and Edward Simpkins, Telegraph, 7 May 2006
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Blair and what is to follow
Though it is only a minor theory, I believe Blair is staying on as long as he thinks he can because it will make him richer afterwards not because he believes he can do anything constructive for the country. For example, by swanning around the world fixing other countries problems - being seen, in effect - he will be increasing the readership for his memoire opus, for which he will surely earn a cool £10 worldwide.
it is these calculations, which a man like him (in my view a total egotist and unreconstructed snake oil salesman) will think perfectly normal - his right - which make me sick of politicians. I don't believe Prime Ministers,or Presidents for that matter, should be able to use their jobs to make themselves rich afterwards. I believe they should be satisfied with their massively over-inflated pensions (who gets what they get for such a short 'contribution'?) : and so off to good works for the poor in the West Midlands or Burundi (whichever they feel most efficacious).
Brown wil be a hopeless Prime Minister because he is totally unable to sympathise or empathise with the people he will be leading. He is a poor communicator. He has a brain, indeed he would have been more suited to academe, but its machinations will be torn three ways between the New Labour Man he is pretending to be, his real beliefs which are pretty much clause 4 Old Labour, and his son of the Manse ethos.
It will be a blessed relief for us all if the Conservatives win to get shot of this load of third-raters, poseurs and pretenders, who have managed to hold on to power yet do little worthwhile for the people who voted them in for 9 years.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Council Tax hike plans
Council tax bills 'to rise by over 40pc
By Patrick Hennessy, Political Editor, The Sunday Telegraph
30/04/2006
There are three areas of public life worthy of a revolution: the NHS, education and the bleeding (as in 'its a bleeding up by the back-door tax) Council tax.
When I write 'revolution', I do not mean get out there with a stick and bash a police man type revolution, but using the power of the internet to let the 'powers that be' (one of those ridiculous phrases which it is necessary to use when in full sarco-mode) know enough is enough: if they don't sort it we will.
This would mean an integrated, sustained campaign to get the government to do what we want rather than what civil servants dream up.
In the case of local government, where the proportion needed to run councils is so highly weighted towards pension provision they can think of nothing else, members of revolutionary committees would be dispatched forthwith to the treasury with a plastic carrier bag for the money needed to run the council. In the meanwhile everyone would be told to stop paying council tax.
The internet is the best place to start such a grass-roots campaign. I would humbly suggests the first stage is for more people to start start contacting other like-minded people, start weblogs, write to the government websites concerned, flooding the system with emails.
Then, using the NHS as an example, tell them that if they don't do what we want, we will walk into the hospitals taking them over ourselves, sacking all the little shiny suiters, and appointing predominantly medically trained boards to run the places as if they were not part of the greater NHS, but simply franchise operations. Someone necessarily will have to make laws for the operation of this 'franchise'. We will surround Parliament in vast numbers till the greasy policians do it.
During this revolutionary period there will be great turmoil for hospital staff and management, civil servants and politicans, but the patients will be properly looked after. There will be no more nursy can't be bothered to check if Mr. Jones has finished on the loo.
There will be no more agency staff, they will be sacked en mass to help bring back the requisite ethos. If necessary volunteers will help to plug the gap in staffing till more nurses can be found.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
NHS
The money addicts: its your money they are gambling with
Never mind the patient just tick the box
It's the great NHS spending party - patients not invited
Pay for nurses and surgeons doubles NHS overspend
::
I worked in the NHS for 1 year in the early 70s. I think I am entitled on this basis to make the claim the NHS is more a job creation scheme than a medical service and had been so since its inception.
The unions leaders, who are needed to protect their workers from low wages and to ptotect their health and safety at work, still have the sort of views unreconstructed characters we might have come across in "Im all right Jack" starring Peter Sellars would spout. When did you ever see/hear a to-camera piece with a health union official saying, the patients must come first?
The recent furore over money wasted is only a matter of degree. For some inexplicable reason (doh...) the New Labour government has seen fit to pump even more vaste amounts of money, the sort of money that would keep a Third World country afloat for another year, or at a pinch its nomenclatura in black Mercedes and flights to foreign capitals for shopping sprees, without first setting up a system to make sure it didn't simply disappear down the hole the rest of the money wnet down.
To say that the mangemet that has strangled the NHS was put in palce to achieve this novble aim is bollocks of a monumenbtal nature. they are there because people who spend tax payers money can always find new ways to spend it.
Picking on individaul historical problems within the NHS at random, I chose firstly, the nurses. Mostly of them very nice, and I've know a few. But when they transferred from on-the-job training to a "degree" in nursing, they effectively destroyed the nursing profession as if was established by, who, someone or other.
The nurse with a degree was taught everything but how to make beds, empty bedpans, tend to superating wounds, turns demented patients with bed sores, and ultimately tie up the dead in whire sheets. Nursy now saw herself (and many traditionally trained nurses left at the stage when this training system was being overhalled and new degeed nurses started to enter employment with the NHS) s some above the bread and butter issue of patient care and more as a secondary doctor. With their skillful indoctination in all maters sociolical and feminist, this was inevitable.
The logic of translating the nursing trining into an academic subject was presiumably inescable for the bureaucracy in charge: it probably involved the persuasion that this new course would encourage more to join nursing training. it failed to deal with the essnetial problem which we can now see at our leisure: the distancing of the nurse from the patient (except in the form of the nursing auxillary, who appears to do the real nursing now).
The resut was many good nurses resigning then coming back in white uniforms as agency staff on twice the pay. The downside was a loss of accountability and the slow erosion of the ethos which was part of the NHS nursing. An agency nurse would come or not according to whim: tired, hang over tempory job elsewhere..
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Why are some animals so smart?
Thursday, March 30, 2006
£52.5 million in 6 years on management consultants for NHS
But it seems it is worse than that. An estimated £200 million has been thrown down the gutter for these tripe-merchants to say the bleeding obvious with the aid or white-boards, PowerPoint presentations and longwinded, big-worded reports which top mangement is too scared to admit they can't understand a word of. Hence the clearly sane response to ask for another report to keep the MC's on the go and out of their hair.
NHS advisers 'cost £200m' as key jobs go
There can be a case for an outsiders perspective but how much time does a person need to spend doing that? Some companies keep a permant work-force of consultants on their staffs. Where did I read that management actually have cannily latched on to other uses for the management consultant - the bringer of bad news and the facilitator for unpopular changes to established practices.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Blonde cave girls?
Cave-girls were first blondes to have fun
Now lets check this again.
(1) a blonde blue eyes cave-girl appeared (genetically speaking) and stood out from the crowd of mousy haireds.
(2) The few cave-men who survived the trepidations of hunting were more attracted to her than the brown haired dark-eyed ones
(3) Voila, lots of blue-eyed blondes in Sweden!
Hang on! What happens if they weren't very good looking? Surely whatever brain the cave-men had would be engaged in sorting this little cumundrum out? ugly/ blonde - ravishing/ mousy, which do I chose?
Then again, maybe looks didn't come into in those brutish and short lives.
Back to natural selection and sexual selection. Which one are we dealing with here?
Behavioural economics/ Neuroeconomics
If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’ Now we want chocolate, cigarettes, and a trashy movie. In the future, we want to eat fruit, to quit smoking, and to watch Bergman films.The Marketplace of Perceptions
Behavioral economics explains why we procrastinate, buy, borrow, and grab chocolate on the spur of the moment.
Neuroeconomics
A branch of behavioral economics called neuroeconomics looks inside the brain with scanning tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate patterns of motivation.
Both from Harvard Magazine
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Pinky and the Brain stem - the Movie
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Beware the IDs of non biologists
Saw the guy behind the anti-evolution organisation, Access Research Network
on TV a month or two ago. Well funded by all accounts.
This interview with the late mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
comes from there.
I've got to the bit where he says
Darwinists imagine that it requires what? A thousand or two thousand genes to assemble an eye, the specification of the organ thus requiring one or two thousand units of information? This is absurd!And am now on full alert....
At the most basic one can see though something like explaining consciousness is fraught with difficulties (the hard and the otherwise problem, etc), the evolutionary mechanism is a balance between maintaining the consistency of form and function while allowing for change. The whole of biochemistry and physiology works on a feedback system which is not unlike a sophisticated computer programme with the proviso that the programmer is in there too, patching and adding new sections of code, as it were, according to changing circumstances. Although when one considers the everyday, but complex, functioning of an organ such as the liver, it does become a wonder as to how, qua evolution and the formation of new species, one can continue to have a fully functioning liver which serves the organism it is in, as it should, and to to have the subtle changes required for it to serve the changing needs of the organism (new species or developing species in the offing as well) in relation to its environment.
This brings me to something learnt as a student: Principles of taxonomy/Taxonomy and Evolution. Dr. Garth Underwood,[ Garth Leon Underwood 1919–2002 ] University of West Indies, British Museum, expert herpetologist. Still have his notes (17.11.72, etc.). For example a simple check list
Taxonomic characteristics
Anatomical
Gross
Microscopical
Ultramicroscopical
Physiological
Biochemical; including serological
Genetical; including chromosomes
Ecological
Behavioural
Devlopmental
Separate characters
correlated characters
Inapplicable characters
Pleiotropism [genes produce effects not related to one another but which have the same genetic basis]
Allometry [tying together of two characters developmentally e.g. Deers antlers and size of body – so not separate characters]
Character states
Two state characters
Multiple state characters
Quantitiative characters
Merietic[always have 11 teeth not 11 1/2
Continuously variable [adult size is extremely variable: can group the sizew into various categories]
Proportions
Environmental influence
show how sophisticated it all is.
He showed in his marvellous lectures how one species of snake (his specialism) was distinguished from another often initally only through minute variations skull plate structure. Other differences might then be discovered, such as serum. Even then there might be disputes as to whether A and B were distinct species or varieties of the same one. The more biochemical or physiological differences emerging would firm it up.
Another lesson in all this is from animals such as birds and insects which again might not be significantly different form, but have behavioural charecteristics which defined their specieshood. Species A has one type of song (and that could be a bird song or a cricket stridulation). If I remember correctly (better read up some of those notes) you could get intermediates, but how that worked, qua species, I can't remember. Though in the end it is whether they interbred which counted evolutionarily. Gene pools. But even the notion that two insects do not mate if they fail to recognise or respond to subtly different but not dissimilar calls is easy to grasp. Its not all about gross morphology or some sort of physiological incompatibility that might prevent fertilisation.
While in a sense evolution happens at the individual level, since it is the changes at each meiosis and the combination of complementary set of genes at fertilisation which are what is passed on, and both transmit differences and end up regulating the integrity of the species, evolution is also studied in population terms.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Blogger Problems
If anyone is having problems posting with one of their Blogger blogs, please let me know.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
Seed Magazine
Science is culture
e.g. Dangerous Minds
Thoughts from the Edge of science
12 January 2006
Reflections on Mirror Neurons
Broken Mirror Neuron Systems May Cause Autism
7 December 2005
Science is culture
e.g. Dangerous Minds
Thoughts from the Edge of science
12 January 2006
Reflections on Mirror Neurons
Broken Mirror Neuron Systems May Cause Autism
7 December 2005
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Sunday, January 22, 2006
I think I'm doing a public service by linking to this item which shows:
26pc of council tax goes on public pensions
Patrick Hennessy, The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 22 January 2006
which I had heard at least a year ago.
Far be it from me to start a Council Tax riot, but if we don't like this tax we have to stand up and say so. One of the things you will also notice is that most District Council, and for all I know a lot of County Council) offices are brand spanking new (well only about 10 years old)- probably justified by some bright spark saying they needed a decent building to put the IT in.
~~~
Whose pension are you paying?
takes the discussion on.
What I'd like to see is some examples of what they take home on retirement as a proportion of their final salary, of course.
~~~
Although, as is made clear her, Police are paid out of a central fund which is partly financed by contributions from councils, this is the folly of letting our politicians do what they like without intervening ourselves to say what we would like. Anyone who has got little or no help from the Police on anti-social behaviour complaints will I am sure feel gretly heated to leanr that as well as calling roud to the house to offer consolation, they spent hours filling forms to note they had done so. "And I said to Mrs. Jones, 'I am terribly sorry to hear your lounge window has been stoved in Mrs. Jones...' " "Mrs. Jones replied, 'Is that all your going to do about this?' " I replied,' Well, times is money, as they, Mrs. Jones. I must get back to fill in a report on our conversation and tick the boxes for the government statistics.' "
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Neuroscience gears up for duel on the issue of brain versus deity
A letter from Kenneth S. Kosik* to Nature
- * Neuroscience Research Institute, Department of Molecular and Cellular and Developmental Biology, Bio II, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-5060, USA
Friday, January 20, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Shaun Bailey and Henry Bonsu
Following from his Centre for Policy Studies sponsored pamphelet, No man’s land, How Britain’s inner city young are being failed, of which this is the pdf chapter one, two articles he has written based on this:
Focus: My battle with liberal Britain
The Sunday Times 27 November 2005
Don't forget the other three pages.
The reason our streets are so violent
The Telegraph 19 January 2006
This week another young man instantly recognisable to many but who I had never heard of, Henry Bonsu, was on Richard and Judy, which I switched on just in time to see him talking along similar lines about (black ) yoof.
Henry I learn from a root around has recently been sacked by the BBC from hosting a radio programme because he was too intellectual (or so it is suggested).
~~~
Just picked up on a spiked article by Stuart Waiton:
Antisocial behaviour: the construction of a crime
19 January 2006
Now the New Labour government has revealed its 'respect' agenda, the problem of 'antisocial behaviour' has moved to the forefront of political debate. But what is it?
which is a handy bit of reading to go with Shaun and Henrys thoughts. I have not been able to find a quote based on Henry's discussion but I expect one will turn up sooner than later.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Prof. Raymond Bradley of the University of Aukland in his short digi-piece Intelligent Design or Natural Design , in Butterflies & Wheels, works through the problem at a level which most intelligent people could grasp, plus he has provided a useful graphic as a pdf (concepts of design and their logical liasons).
The An open letter to Anthony Flew from Bradley had a reply from Flew in an academic Journal which has not got free web acesss, but the subsequent Antony in Wonderland: A Rejoinder to Professor Flew is available, plus an article by Richard carrier ( Antony Flew Considers God...Sort Of ) which arose during the media flurry over Flew's original "conversion".
Prof. Bradley's homepage has a series of links to some of his other writing, quite a few on this subject or related in some way to it.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Why "monkey see monkey do" isn't for apes
John Hawk's weblog succintly explains the experiment carl Zimmer did comparing his daughter's ability with a chimp following experiments by Andrew Whiten and colleagues on chimps, which he also reports.
Dennett on evolution and religion
A two part Der Spiegal interview with Daniele Dennett:
"Darwinism Completely Refutes Intelligent Design"
and a discovery from this of a weblog, Brain Ethics [consequences of brain science] by
Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy and Martin Skov
who pin-point two academic articles which look interesting:(1) Cognitive neuroscience of humn social behaviour
(2) Functional anatomy of human social cognition
Pleased to see the mention of autism in BrainEthics because it has been a constant interest of mine in relation to TOM, etc.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
You can't prove a pig can fly by showing that butterflies have wings
Cardinal Schönborn's re-explanation, "The Designs of Science", in First Things
following much debate as to what he was on about : Finding Design in Nature, NYT, July 7, 2005
This latter courtesy of The Schönborn Site which summarises the argument in its weblog
I'm not too happy with the distinction the Cardinal makes between Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. Google: neo-darwinism gives a wide selection of references on neo-Darwinism, these {1} and {2} being the first two on the listing.
The Cardinal starts his argument in Finding Design in Nature with :
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.It is understandable, if you believe in a creator, how you might see the patterns of nature to be proof of God's plan. However, in this stylised debate, we get nowhere unless we are allowed to go beyond these unprovable assertions to questions about order (and disorder) in biological systems, phenotypic, genetic, biochemical, electrical. For example, the neuronal system is pretty much the same mechanism right across the animal kingdom, and though it may be used to argue for a supernatural plan, it also shows certain things stay the same in nature: every aspect of biology is not in a continuous flux explained by mutation and natural selection. All the best arguments for evolution (pre- or post genetics) are based on evidence beyond the reach of the human eye. SEE Plagarized errors and molecular genetics
And please : evolution is not about the origin of life, but the connection between one individual organism and another. When you talk of a species you are talking about a set of individuals. In evolution this is whether they survive to breed or not. Add to that that these individuals exist mostly in groups (populations) and that these populations range about in habitats.
...
If you want to compare like with like, then you need a set of correct analogues to start with.
In this 1997 paper, Empathy and Analogy, by Allison Barnes and Paul Thagard, we get a little snippet [ section 2. Analogy as a cognitive process] which shows us how Darwin used analogy to push his case. If you teach evolution by starting with the ideas in the Origin of Species this is what you start with, though strangely this is not science but logical inference. The science is the observation bit that animals are bredd into different configurations and that there are different configuration in nature without man's interference.
I recommend Revisiting Science in Culture: Science as Story Telling and Story Revising
if you are a bit hazy about what science is.
...
other sources:
Argument by Analogy
Wiki: analogy
Analogy vs. metaphor
...
One of the problems I face in this is the anthropomorphic nature of God's relationship with Man.
Another is that of the human ability to find pattern in everything, even faces in clouds if we have a mind to. In essence this is about subtraction, not adding. We can't (don't unless we are strongly autistic) live in real time with everything we sense. We don't remember everything we see or hear or smell. This would be too much for us to cope with. So we simplify things down (or rather our brains do it for us.
it is interesting to note, too, that one of the best ways to remember things, a set of objects, a shopping list, is to place them in a framework such as a virtual museum, with the scissors in the hand of the man in the foyer, the rubber along the top of the picture frame of the Mona Lisa in room 1, and so on.
Perhaps that's why we like stories so much!
...
Our relationship to God is based on our consciousness of him. Presumably that is why theologians have always had a problem with the relationship between the animals and God. If they are not conscious in the way we are, how can God exist for them? That wasn't a problem when the Bible was written. They took a secondary role: something that God put there for us to use. Attitudes to our fellow creatures have shifted as society has changed.
All this is essentially about how we SEE God, not so much how he really is, or what he can do. We are bound to think and feel he is something or other, and can do certain things because we have brains to think and feel.
...
God is necessarily a priori but we argue for him a posteriori !
...
All this then leads, in a necessary segue, to objectivity and subjectivity, a very big, though mostly philosophical topic of great interest. Before we know it we are re-visiting Plato's forms and all sorts of other technicalities working everything right up to the present day with Chalmer's "Hard problem" and qualia!
Neo-Darwinism: What is at Stake? Tom Bethell
I don't think this is very helpful, but he has a few starting points for discussion.
Evolving Thoughts on the other hand is full of interest and important things which even a non-expert could make an effort to get to grips with.
This site deals with evolution and theology in a comprehensive hypertext based on 'God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A textbook in science and religion.' The author Dr. Christopher Southgate the Co-ordinating Editor of God, Humanity and the Cosmos, trained originally in research biochemistry. He is now a poet and editor, and Part-time Lecturer in Theology at the University of Exeter. His last book was A Love and its Sounding (University of Salzburg, 1997).
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
You'll never squawk alone
Nigel Bunyan, Telegraph, 25 October2005
It's not just Liverpool. And its probably those memes in soaps that has done it. What they see in East Enders or Coronation Street must be the norm, presumably. Life reflecting art, or vice versa?
Another of my pet theories is that we are so much just mere consumers we do not learn about the little things in our own lives that make one life distinct from another, as we might have done in the past, but through top-down templates, a mish-mash of TV drama, apolcalytic news, product advertising, fantastical lives of the stars and minor celebs, gagetry and debt, etc. Every family in debt is like every other and has the same solution: don't spend so much. Learn to want less. There might be a lot more depression arond. But depression cuts you off from everything even your emotions. So when you have recovered from a downer you suddenly need somwhere to put all that spare feeling....
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Watched the documentary - had a few ideas and such
Bill Oddie with his starlings was one of the most spectular sights ever. Guess it must be available somewhere on the internet. No one could possibly look at this sort of phenomemon without going into explanation and analogy modes once the wonder of it all has sunk in. Well I can't.
As a spectacle it is both miraclous and mysterious. They are gathering in the autumn for migration, but to see the patterns they create in the sky, then pouring out of those patterns down to the reed beds below is verging on the incredible. This a rare occasion where you can use one part of the brain to appreciate something while using the other to ask those le-e-e-tle questions humans are prone to ask, such as: Why is this happening and how is it down.
The obvious one to tick off are safty in numbers: the patterns which we appreciate are simply the overt three dimensional result of group action. Yet it seems so coordinated. So do the oceans full of sardines swirling and shimmering to avoid their predators.
Went from this to whether the starlings could tell us something. I wrote a little bit about politics using the flocking patters as an analogy, but thought, today, had better look something up. Pleased to find Context discussing swarming intelligence. It mentions the sort of fact you can always use: a typical flock of starlings (about 2,000 birds) contains as much brain tissue as a single human, and led to
Flocking together: Study shows how animal groups find their way
from Princeton U.Essentially it is not as we might imagine some complex set of rules, but rather based on
(1) the need to stay in a group
(2) the desire by some individuals to act on their own information about where to go
Anothet summary post in context does symbiosis, which is the sort of thing to go for if you were thinking about parallels. A fuller article : Cooperation is a No-brainer for Symbiotic Bacteria
Human cooperation: biological basis revealed leads to
Emory brain imaging studies reveal biological basis for human cooperation
Links to cluster computing and swarm technologies
Boids
Hey, if notthing else its something to look at whenthe mind is tired of thoughts....but don't miss the text below it
From here I am going back to :
Darwin and political theory
which deals in part with Pinker's The Blank Slate
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Not my cats, just visitors. Luckily for them I'm a fan.
This plastic bowl has internal dimensions of 26 x 26 cm.
Tabby from tip to tip is slightly over 45 cm. long, tail straight.
When I went downstairs to do the measurement, Tonkinese was completely covering her friend....
If only life was so simple for us.
So what do you have to do to find happiness?
It seem quite a lot more than cats and dogs, mice, rats, hedgehogs, cows, sheep, pigs, terpines, lizards, crocodiles, snakes, three-spined stickle backs, cuttlefish.
Our difficulty, according to Daniele Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions - the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens - that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain's reward system.
....brain chemistry foils our pursuit of happiness in the modern world: "Things that you desire ar enot the things that you end up liking. The mechanisms of desire are insatiable. There are things we really like and tire of less quickly - having good friends, and the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the psychology of wanting, and the psychology of liking gets drowned out."Read and enjoy. it is significant.
Psychologist Martin Seligman:
Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked for the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
Journal of Religion and Society Vol 7 2005
* basic correlations of the elemental data
* This is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health.
Check out the 7 graphs
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
THE GOD MODEL
Viewing a model as a collection of facts which satisfies a theory, is not the same as viewing a model as something that explains or emulates some phenomenon or situation. This second concept of model is closer to the concept of a scientific theory .
I have been getting myself thoroughly confused in moleskine modality over how to explain the concept of model and relate it to the idea that model, metaphor and analogy are the only ways to explain anything.
One aspect of this has inevitably to be the God Model.
Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'.
The Times 27 Septembr 2005
This all reminds me of 30 odd years ago when I though I had a god definition of God which, paraphrased roughly, was
God is the gap {substitute more appropriate word} between what we are and what we hope {would like}{think we ought} to be.
Is this gap theology or apophatic (negative) theology? Could it be termed but rather aspiration theology? Personal knowledge, must include recognition of human limitations.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Last rose of summer22 September 2005. Strangely, took this without realising 22 September was the autumn equinox.
wiki : autumn equinox
The rose was there in its prime, so clipped it, took it straight upstairs , photographed it and sent it to my beloved. Only later did the date come into play. Maybe since our weather is so mild now, there will be a few more. In which case there might be a real last rose later.
Heard the weather man say 21st, summer over, got that regetentwingeismus: we haven't had a summer yet; nights drawing in; long winter to endure. Think what it must have been like for the ancients.
The web soon puts you right on so many things. Has anyone one has put a figure (ratio, percentage) on the amount of disinformation to information out there? Iit is our job to educate ourselves and our children to tell the difference as best as we are able.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Though Katrina has reaped a tragedy which we can all relate to, I am more interested in the American reponse to having to pay more for petrol. Not because as some people are writing {Spiked: After Katrina another putride deluge } it serves them right for being the major contributor to global warming, but because it helps them to think about whether they might be through having to consider travel arrangments in a way many of them might not have had to before. This, of course, comes from wanting a level playing field: I can't see why I pay $7 a gallon and they have been paying less than a third of that. Indeed I can't see why I am paying 0.90p a litre and the Spanish are paying two-thirds of that.
When I see young boys who can't even afford the petrol let alone the car insurance driving around willy-nilly, I know in my heart they would continue to do so if it went up to £7 a gallon. People want the freedom that the car has provided. Now they have tasted the freedom ( the best part of 50 years of mass car use in the west), you'll have to shoot them to curbe their car use.
Part of the response is in articles such as:
Gas price cutbacks extend to boaters which shows plus ca change plus cest le meme chose: people always think of themselves first, quite naturally, and are rarely confronted with the need to consider "The Needs of Strangers" (Ignatieff).
That's why the wars the U.S. is having to fight now are a good thing (if war can ever be so described): they are - or ought by now to be - learning about some of the rest of the world which they were partially cocooned from by their affluence.
Chavez offers cheap gas to poor in U.S.
is another rsponse! Since the guy got put on the death list by Pat the preacher, this is funny.
Petrol prices in the U.S.
Gaspricewatch
shows
* highest, average and lowest price
fueleconomy.gov = > neworleansgasprices.com
In the UK we are currently paying $7 a gallon
Average price of Unleaded 95 petrol in the UK is: 89.7p
fromWhatprice.co.uk
European price comparison:
see-search.com
Who benefits from rising gas prices?
Europeans pay more for gas, but they also receive additional services from the gas taxes.
What exactly do UK citizens get from petrol tax?
Sunday, August 28, 2005
The theory of "Intelligent Design
Not many IDers {-ists} have actually done any science. Though it is not a bad thing for them to pick holes in evolutionary science. Always pleased to see Brian Appleyard on the evolution vs. Creationism, as here in George Bush and the Meaning of Life, in The Sunday Times 28 August 2005, where he does at least clarify the difference between ID (accepts age of earth) and creationists proper (Bible dates) even if he doesn't go into enough detail to make a decent fist of it.
Since I did biology, though no expert, this subject is always fascinating.
To counterpoise this rather basic essay (Appleyard has written often on evolution and several books such as Brave New Worlds, where he essays his concerns about science and technology), I would suggest:
Plagarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
by Edward Max, a molecular biologist, which is a slog but worth staying with.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The evolution versus creation season is upon us once again.
Oh, not again!
I have a theory (as yet unproved but open to testing by the rigors of scientific method...) that there is an evolution versus creation season which runs roughly from the end of the parliamentary year to early autumn. It is characterised by a slew of articles and attendant letters to editors, in which creationists try to pick holes in the theory of evolution and very few scientists bother to pick holes in the holes the hole-pickers think they have picked. Apparently they are frightened to be seen doing so for fear of seeming to suggest by so doing that ID or the more basic creationism has any merit. I see the point.
It has begun in earnest - print media wise - 'cos Peter Hitchens is reporting (well not so much as reporting as asking)fom Lawrence Texas,(combining business with pleasure in visiting his brother Chris while he was it to see his nephew?) in a two-page spread, "Did Darwin get it wrong after all?".
Lets get a few things straight:
1. Intelligent Design (as we now must call creation) has a lot more resting on it for its adherents than evolutionary theory has for evolutionary biologists and those who accept Darwin's theory and all its various modifications. (It didn't stop with Darwin). If Intelligent design was proved to be wrong (and it can't be because its a belief not a theory -God being supernatural) it might upset God but it would certainly infuriate the Bibal literalists who must have as their true agenda not the debunking of a well-accepted biological theory but the fear of very basis of their religion beinf undermined. Since this was thoroughly done from 1853 onwards, isn't it a bit late to be worrying now? Note: one other set of religious who get equally upset about their Book being disputed.
2. Peter Hutchins writes about evolutionists thinking their theory was safe. If they did so they wouldn't be thinking scientifically. Scientists may like theories to stick because they invented them, but using the word "safe" makes it seem as if this would lead to some dire consequences for humanity if it didn't, in the case of evolution. What would be safe would be the actual, ongoing means by which all the great variety of species arose, whether know to us or not. If there is a mechanism it must still be operating, though hardly for Homo Sapiens except in rather less obvious areas such as the immune system and maybe behaviour.
3. You can't prove a pig can fly by showing that butterflies have wings, in the wonderful expression used in an article by Ben Bova in Nova many years ago.
4. Mechanisms posited for evolution are criticised as being too ingenious to have come about by chance. As if chance meant the sort of random throwing on of clothes found scattered around the room before rushing off to work.
5. Any mention of the words "the ideas behind Intelligence design" actually means God. Creationists have no idea how God so ordered the world - they see it is ordered - though they believe he did.
6. If the creationists got their way so that no school text books mentioned evolution it would not be the end of the world. However, if the Bible was declared illegal, certain people would prefer to die (and go to heaven) than live without it. As long as they don't starting sending their "enemies" in this debate to another world before they are ready to go(Hell in their case since they are usually non-believers) to unhold their views.
7. Teaching Creation and evolution side by side, as many want, would be the quickest way to destroy the creationists "theories" which actually rest on debunking other evolutionary theories, not on creating theories of their own. If those teaching ID were forced to quote the Bible as the source of their theory, chapter and verse, it wouldn't seem such a great idea. As long the argument from faith is stoked up by creationists the less likely anyone is going to be asked to think intelligently about what it all actually means. Saying God was behind intelligent design (as in theory) would also mean doing some theology and you know where that gets you.
8. You can't have a level playing field for evolutionary theory and creationism?ID in schools because one is a scientific theory that can be refuted and the other is a set of beliefs which are not susceptible to scientific method at all. The easiest way would be for the biology teacher to teach evolutionary theory, and the religious education teacher to debate creation vs. evolution. But of course the creationists wouldn't want that: their true intention is not to dispute the basics of evolution (n.b. theory is well accepted while hypothesis is just that, and idea based on what has gone before) but to muddy the waters and confuse student who don't even undertand the basics of evolution.
I like what George Monbiot has to say on the debate in relation to George W's views.
9. Poor teacher who answered her children's questions by suggesting dinosaurs were with Noah on the Ark, is heading in the right direction away from concentration on evolution (which practically does matter) towards genetics and ecology. For example we might start by agreeing that dinosaurs no longer exist and have become extinct for some rason. How they got here can be left out of it. This is of more fundamental interest. Why do species die out? Why have so many species which existed in our time become extinct,such as many birds and butterflies? The answer : because the environment changed making it impossible for them to breed. An entity - a species - whatever its supposed origin, has a biology which included genetics. Genetics leads to question on inheritance and then to those about how genetics can go wrong as in physical and mental abnormalities and cancer.
10. If you consider the photograph of peach I picked this afternoon you might do what Darwin did. He studied plants and animals with a few to explaining the variety. One method he used was argument by analogy: using domestic animal breeding to explain the evolutionary mechanism.
You could be even more basic and say everyone is a scientist at art heart because they record things like the first ripe peach, or even how many peaches a tree produced, year by year. Just counting isn't science. But suggesting in our example why fruit ripens at one time rather than another could be. You would need to do some sort of test of whatever idea you came up with. It's the warmth. It's the amount of light per day.
That in itself wouldn't be the final answer because once the sun or warmth was found to be responsible (it could be any number of factors including something like differential uptake of minerals in the roots) it might also be possible to suggests how the sun or warmth effects ripening. This would require some physiological and/or biochemical knowledge. If you want to pulp that peach to find out if there are substances that weren't there before ripening.....
Grobstein, P. (2005). Revisiting science in culture: Science as story telling and story revising. Journal of Research Practice, 1(1), Article M1. Retrieved [Date of Access], from
http://jrp.icaap.org/content/v1.1/grobstein.html
goes into what the scientific method is using a simple diagram to compare the old terminology : hypothesis now being termed "summary of conclusions".
Read on.
::
The Hay on Wye discussion between Peter and Christopher which mostly covered brotherly falling out but which also had this :
PH:
Oh, it's never been an issue. I returned as it were to the Anglicanism of my childhood. Such as it was - it wasn't particularly strong: one has some background music of Hymns Ancient & Modern and the King James Bible, but not very much more than that. I'm probably keener about it now than I was then. I suppose [I returned] in my early 30s when people sometimes do, when various things start happening. As an issue between us I think he overestimates the issue. He has several faiths. He has the faith I think of Darwinism, which is just like Christianity an unproven and unprovable theory, which you can believe in if you want because you prefer that arrangement of the universe. I happen to think the arrangement of the universe based on the belief in intelligent design is more tolerable both morally and
aesthetically, but he prefers another. I dislike only the attitude of the atheist that his is not a faith, cause it is. I have absolutely no disgust or anger at anybody who disagrees with me about that. I'm much more worried by people who are indifferent to the question.
CH:
Ah, well I agree with that. There may be many things to be said against atheism - I'm not an atheist anyway, I'm an anti-theist. It would be horrible if it were true that we were designed and then created and then continuously supervised throughout all our lives waking and sleeping and then continue to be supervised after our deaths - if that were true, it would be horrible. I'm very glad there's absolutely no evidence for it at all. It would be like living in a celestial North Korea. You can't defect from North Korea but at least you can die. With monotheism they won't let you die and get away from them. It's the wish to be a slave. Who wants that to be true? It's demanding the servile condition. I'll give you a hint of how much I don't like it. We don't need to go regularly to chant a liturgy or a mantra and be reinforced by a priest. We obviously absolutely don't need it. It's the conclusion to which any reasoning, thinking person can come and increasing numbers do. It doesn't put you in conflict with objective reality all the time or under the control of a supposedly spiritual leadership. Peter said one prefers to think Darwin is right. No, one takes the facts and examines them. The fact that one's appearance on earth is a random process conditioned by evolution and will end in extinction isn't a welcome conclusion. It's just an inescapable one, and to be in denial about it is odd. And Darwinism is not the theory of evolution. It is a theory of evolution. The quarrel between say Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, two of the greatest of biologists and palaeontologists, about punctuated evolution shows there is a great deal to argue about and no one disputes that we have evolved. It's in the fossil record. PH: It actually isn't proven. It is a choice. That's the important thing that you choose to believe it. Your choice may be unwelcome to you and my choice my be equally unwelcome to me, but it's one that you take as a matter of preference. There are many different forms of religion. Christopher in his latest contribution to Slate talks about something called 'serious Islam' which came as something of a shock to me after Islamofascism, but I think there are different forms of religion. And I happen think that the combination of scripture, reason and tradition which is at the heart of serious Anglicanism is both appealing, constructive, and actually leads on to a much greater exercise in liberty than that which tends to result from the actions of political idealists who want to load us with identity cards and put us in North Koreas. And I would much prefer a world governed by conscience than a world governed by idealists who think they know best about how we should run our lives. And conscience is the governor of a world where God is sovereign. It's an immense argument, as I say. For him to dismiss my position or for me to dismiss his, would be wrong. I don't dismiss his. I'm worried by it, I think about it a lot, I would be idle to say it didn't have any strengths. I just prefer mine.
See Guardian
In The Sunday Mail (print edition) there is a two-pager by Peter H, Did Darwin get it wrong afer all? A "Special report" from Lawrence, Texas. Wonder if he used the opportunity to
pop up to see his brother and his nephew? Peter doesn't seem to think Darwin was wrong.
I never forget the Ben Bova article in Nova magazine in the 70s win which he used the classic formulation, paraphrased here as "You can't prove that pigs can fly by demonstrating that butterflies have wings". And he wasn't referring to the evolutionary theorists!
Trying to find the exact words AIATCWTWUASE {as is always the case with the web using a search engine}, came across this set of quotations any number of which could be used in the evolution vs. creation (use creation and creationist never ID}. If you like a combination of something irritating to mock and a intellectual challenge, here is something from our friends at Intelligent design:
Evangelical scientists refute gravity with new " Intelligent falling" theory
which is set to supersede Newton's feeble ideas. It might come in handy when evolutions supporters stand up as a man to say enough is enough, a joke is a joke. Creation "theorists" (I thought that was God and as you know we don't know His mind} can use the concept of intelligent falling to get themselves out of the trap they led themselves ito with ID by saying they fell for ID ut it was just God' way of showing we're only human.
::
In this forum debating E/C, these are some of the views:
"That assumes G-d plays by the *rules* of logic, which he might not.
Because, *by definition*, he *doesn't* have to play by your rules of logic. He can set up rules for this universe and do as he pleases without regard for them.
- Henry Cotter "
"So He _can_ make a rock so big He can't lift it? Pretty cool. If God truly can transcend logic, that explains how he can be omni-benevolent while still forcing us to live in a universe with
typhoid fever, leeches, and infomercials."
-Arbane the Terrible (arbane#attbi.com) in rec.games.frp.misc
"Did you know that scientific evidence abounds to support the biblical accounts of creation and the flood? Were you aware that reports outlining this evidence passed peer review, and were published in the open scientific literature? Have you heard that, decades later, this evidence still stands unrefuted by the scientific community?
Etched within Earth's foundation rocks — the granites — are beautiful microspheres of coloration, halos, produced by the radioactive decay of primordial polonium, which is known to have only a fleeting existence.
The following simple analogy will show how these polonium microspheres — or halos — contradict the evolutionary belief that granites formed as hot magma slowly cooled over millions of years. To the contrary, this analogy demonstrates how these halos provide
unambiguous evidence of both an almost instantaneous creation of granites and the young age of the earth."
I would suggest this piece be used in a high school class to discuss what we can possibly know. Polonium is a fact, so is granite...but there embedded in the text is
"....An exceedingly large number of polonium halos are embedded in granites around the world. Just as frozen Alka-Seltzer bubbles would be clear evidence of the quick-freezing of the water, so are these many polonium halos undeniable evidence that a sea of primordial
matter quickly "froze" into solid granite. The occurrence of these polonium halos, then, distinctly implies that our earth was formed in a very short time, in complete harmony with the biblical record of creation."
Not just the granite, mind. The whole earth comes into this category.
another correpondent says:
" There is no evidence that the halos were formed by polonium in the first place."
I would start with this..if I had known it. trouble is I assumed the polonium was the cause of the bubbles.
Another commenter:
"Quite amusing. I'm not sure why frozen "haloes" in granite should support the biblical record of creation in particular. Surely, if true, it should support any model of creation that included a rapid formation of the earth, such as the Finnish "cosmic egg" myth.
I read a bit about the halos, they arise in the crystals found in rocks such as granite. They are formed when radioactive impurities within the crystal decay, causing a damage "halo" within the crystal.
Here is a nice summary from a paper refuting R. Gentry's work:
Summary/Conclusions
Gentry's polonium halo hypothesis for a young Earth fails, or is inconclusive for, all tests. Gentry's entire thesis is built on a compounded set of assumptions. He is unable to demonstrate that concentric halos in mica are caused uniquely by alpha particles resulting from the decay of polonium isotopes. His samples are not from "primordial" pieces of the Earth's original crust, but from rocks which have been extensively reworked. Finally, his hypothesis cannot accommodate the many alternative lines of evidence that demonstrate
a great age for the Earth. Gentry rationalizes any evidence which contradicts his hypothesis by proposing three "singularities" - one time divine interventions - over the past 6000 years. Of course, supernatural events and processes fall outside the realm of scientific investigations to address. As with the idea of variable radioactive decay rates, once Gentry moves beyond the realm of physical laws, his arguments fail to have any scientific usefulness. If divine action is necessary to fit the halo hypothesis into some consistent model of earth history, why waste all that time trying to argue about the origins of the halos based on current scientific theory? This is where most Creationist arguments break down when they try to adopt the language and trappings of science. Trying to prove a religious premise is itself
an act of faith, not science.
In the end, Gentry's young Earth proposal, based on years of measuring discoloration halos, is nothing more than a high-tech version of the Creationist "Omphalos" argument. This is the late nineteenth century proposition that while God created the Earth just 6,000 years ago
according to the Genesis account, He made everything appear old.
Unfortunately, because Gentry has published his original work on halos in reputable scientific journals, a number of basic geology and mineralogy text books still state that microscopic discoloration haloes in mica are the result of polonium decay.
* Footnote: Omphalos means navel, and is the title of a book by Phillip Grosse. He argued that God created Adam and Eve with navels even though they had not developed in a womb.
For the full paper:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html "
"ZJ you won't get a Socratic debate with this type on Darwinism, they'll deteriorate the thread into drivel. His History is good, but they get their knickers in a knot over science.
Their attitude toward anyone who challenges Humanist philosophy posing itself as empirical science is that of a self inflated teenager. His type are fanatical and shut out any possibilities but his own idealology.
Debating against this kind on this subject is best avoided.
Fundamentalist like that are blinded with self inflation.
Don't say I didn't warn you?"
" You wanted a Socratic argument? Well, I'll give it a try. Science is not a religion, but is a belief system, in the same way as a religion. Scientific belief is based on evidence, observation, hypothesis and experiment. The only dogma to follow is the scientific method. The conclusions drawn by science are always subject to this method, so they can change if new observations invalidate them. The theory of evolution is one such conclusion that science has come to. In fact, it is one of the strongest theories science has to offer, in
terms of the amount of evidence backing it up.
My point: if evolution is wrong, then it is due to 1/ Bad science ,or 2/ Science itself being flawed.
If you want to critisise the theory due to it being bad science, then I would suggest why is evolution the target of choice, when plenty of other theories have relatively weaker bodies of evidence to support them? If evolution is wrong, with its level of supporting evidence,
then much of the rest of science is likely to be wrong, too.
And if you think Science is flawed as a philosophy, can you suggest an alternative that would do the same thing Science does, only better? If people want to call me a fundamentalist, that's fine. Its coming to something when logic and rational thinking are called into question.
The implementation of them, maybe, but not the very ideas themselves! "
" We really have dinosaurs today, without any question. You just need the right weather conditions, as I see it, to get huge creatures. And in the ocean, of course, we have huge creatures....this is where the plesiosauruses seem to be today, and perhaps also this fire breathing dragon is still down there -- very rare, but occasionally there.
--Rev. Walter Lang
Founder,
Bible-Science Association"
No Reverend, they are extinct, but their cousins are crodiles are not. Nomatter what you do with them apart from sort of science we don't now have they can't be turned into dinosaurs.
"I thought that rather than sink to level of you, that i would point out a few things about you posting. Creationism is based upon the concept that a God or Gods created the universe as mentioned in the Book of genesis. I used the word "Gods" because the hebrew word used in the original texts can mean Gods and more to the point can be of either gender.
In order to support the belief of creationism, one must believe in a Christian God. here we strike the first major problem when discussing creationism with a believer, ask them to prove that their God exists then all you get is mumbo jumbo.
Secondary, in order to believe in creationism, you have to put aside the known history of the world and especially that of the middle east of around 2000 bc. By that I mean the fact that the origins of the idea of creation that is mentioned in the OT can be traced back to Sumerian times and more importantly at a time when the Hebrews were in cultural contact with the Sumerians. "
"Was Darwin right ? What a weird thread. I don't know why the name Darwin incites such responses. He was a simply a man who observed the natural world around him and suggested a cause for the effects he witnessed that didn't involve the direct intervention of a supernatural being. No doubt he made mistakes in the detail, as did many who came after. For example, naturalists on the voyage of the Challenger [ed. Did he/she mean Beagle?] during the 1870's were trying to look through Darwin's eyes when they assumed the aggression seen in the young of certain birds was due to their co-evolution with the Sally Lightfoot crabs which prey on them. What's really happening is sibling rivalry in the nest and a thinning of the brood to one chick. Knowledge accretes and modifies theories.
Evolution by means of selective processes acting on a variable population is borne out by rather a lot of evidence, so in essence, yes, Darwin was on the right track.
Religious fundamentalism is in my opinion a return to primitive thought patterns. "
" I would agree with some of what you say, but I don't think you are quite right when it comes to comparing the dogmas of religion & science. The scientific method is a dogma, but there is thousands of different lines of thought within religions. It is only a certain type of
religious person (fundimentalist) who would have a problem with the Theory of Evolution. The rest wouldn't have a problem with it at all. In fact, the Theory caused a split in the American Church in the 1930's.
Maybe in years to come, we will come to view those who refuse to acknowledge the Theory of Evolution as quaint as those who continued to advocate the Earth was flat, not round.
I also think it highly unlikely that the Theory of Evolution will ever be disproved. But I would qualify this and state it is only a Theory, not Fact. I suppose you could also state this about other Theories: Theory of Gravity, Theory of Relativity, etc. We don't know these as fact,
though our scientific method would suggest they are correct, as far as we can tell. There are certainly experiments out there that have shown up our scientific techniques, but none that have disproved the likes of the Theory of Evolution."
"Many people misunderstand scientific methodology.The point is, scientific theories can be proved, modified or disproved by new data. So it is with evolution, where we can test the ideas put forward to explain how we got here and why we look as we do, what we are related to and how. Religion is based on faith which is not provable in any real sense. If creation by a supernatural being could ever be proved, most evolutionists would be first to try and make contact with the supreme being, so they could ask some more questions. "How did it come about ? How long did it really take and is it finished ? What made you do it and have you done it before ? If you plan to do it again, what would you do differently ?" You got a god ?
You bring him on! "
::
Much serious debate goes on at talkorigins.org. There is a genetically based argument for evolution :
Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
by Edward E. Max which he prefaced with : The following essay is an updating of an article I published in Creation/Evolution in 1986 (XIX, p.34). I am posting it with permission from Creation/Evolution.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Haven't I read this article somewhere before?
Looking at Déjà Vu for the First Time
originally in The Scientist 31 January 2005
Friday, August 05, 2005
Just look up to find happiness
The Sunday Times July 24, 2005
"If you feel down you look down."
Depressiblog : beautiful revolution
Got to depressed or have been to watch his fine little movies...
Monday, July 25, 2005
I Think, Therefore I Am — Sorta :The belief system of a virtual mind
by Margaret Wertheim in LA Weekly
ought to interest anyone who wants to know how their brain works - the article itself doesn't really do that! However, it makes you think a bit in the way the Turing Test did/does, and all the other stuff that one could read about in Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained".
It does not use the term emotions which seems strange since that is where they seem to be going with this : in other words without emotions there is no weighting system in the brain to make decisions about what is import and what is not in the constant stream of information and conceptualisation. Brings to mind the psychology expts. to do with waitress dropping tray. Maybe this will remind you: Movie Poop Shoot. {Just type in tray in FIND once the page loads it takes a couple to get there }
Make up your own experimental design if you can't remember it: start by thinking about real life scenarios where a shock makes you forget what you were thinking or doing. Design a waitress dropping tray experiment : you might set students tasks in the classroom then get someone to come in to the room carrying a tray which is then dropped, creating a clutter, etc,etc.
Background material :
EQ
EI consortium
Both suggest software might be developed which school children could use as a virtual therapist. The major problem in schools, resulting in far more misbehaviour than otherwise, is lack of time to talk through life in general. Few teachers have the desire or flair for this type of interaction. The hours spent dealing with the consequences of bad behaviour might be better spent pre-empting it by having one-to-one or small group sessions with those who request it. A specialist member of staff for the job might be worth one teachers salary. Alternatively, or complementary to, the cyberagent which grasped your basic emotional problems would be a pretty good. And should, of course, be provided to all schools free by an enterprising software company.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Been spreading out my weblog empire and finding it difficult to post to all of them, so have missed out on new blogs aroud including Jonny B's Private Secret Diary which naturally appeals because it is from NW Norfolk and am hoping to catch up on events and trends in my locality.
These two articles go back to some vague recollection about the 'burger herds' of the American (N & S) plains being responsible for a significant proportion of the carbon emissions...
Cow flatulence: a significant contributor to global warming or just a load of hot air?
Reduce Global Warming? Let's Start With Cows
Seeing the TV documentary on the slaughterhouse on BBC made me feel once again I ought to stick to fish, eggs, butter and milk. Though of course could help 'poor Daisy' (who is artifically kept in milk by repeated pragnancies) by having non-milk teas such as peppermint and camomile and using soya milk as much as is bearable.
One of those BBC child documentaries which I saw a small snippet of involved another of these very articulate 7 or 8 year olds tells us she (they) had helped a wounded bird which thy though had broken something by putting it in what looked like a plastic washing basket. Saying when they turned it up the other way and mother came back to feed it, she declaimed so earnestly "This the happiest day of my life!" to which her grandfather replied that she was witnessing the workings of nature. If anyone did not a have a tear in the eye after listening to that....
