cloudsoup

A good walk ruined is how Mark Twain described golf and my only disagreement, I think, is how good the walk would have been on flat fairways and greens, being chivvied along by people behind you, with the prospect ahead of a drink at the clubhouse with bores you’d usually cross the street to avoid.

A few years back the US Open championship website won an award, I think. and this year? Not so good.

Web standards have passed the site by. Layout is managed with tables, the CSS dosn’t validate, the HTML can’t be validated automatically, and it fails the WAI and Section 508 at the first level. That’s a bit of a problem, bearing in mind the successful case brought against the Sydney Olympics Organisers ($50,000).

I can’t even see an RSS feed of the current positions. Bad, really.

Chris Lightfoot is dead. Chris put his imagination and tech skills to a such good purpose in a range of projects, often in cahoots with the MySociety crowd.

I won’t repeat the obits on My Society and many other places all over the web.

I’ll just say that the work Chris did inspired me to setup copycat site once, and that he’s already very greatly missed by many, many people.

According to a campaigning group, staff at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to officially comment on the of the geological feature Apparently, the reason is that the geologic age is way in excess of the apparently 6000 year old age of the planet according to Creationists. Not sure I believe the story, and will look into it further…

Tom Coates, Links for 2006-12-30

That never sounded a plausible story and now we know for sure it’s nonsense. Actually, I already knew it was nonsense. When I visited the Grand Canyon there was no end of information about its age and wonder at the fact of its relatively recent emergence – recent in geological terms, that is.

The Grand Canyon, quite old when I last visited

So how come Mr Coates even bothered to publish a silly rumour, even if he did promise to check it (I wonder how that checking of his is coming along). I think the answer lies in the mea culpa on the Skeptic website which publishes the facts of the matter after conducting some real research, rather than vapour research.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, explains the orgin of the hoax, how he discovered it was a lie, and why he thinks he was taken in. He writes,

Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life … we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) to check it.

Coincidentally, the highly recommended podcast The Skeptics Guide To The Universe from The New England Skeptical Society just this week offered some advice on not being taken in by conspiracy theories, including the wise suggestion to be extra wary if the hypothesis just happened to coincide with your political beliefs or was convenient to your world view. That’s what happened with Michael Shermer, he says as much, and it’s what happened with Tom Coates – although he doesn’t say as much.

Coates has history in his dislike of religion:

Sir Elton John would like to ban all organised religion It’s a sentiment with which I find myself sympathetic to [sic]

and in a willingness to overlook homegrown stupidity when there’s a chance to moan about the US right:

In the meantime, sir [sic], you should know that half of America doesn’t believe in evolution

he said, apparently missing the BBC poll indicating that less than half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll.

The facts of this Grand Canyon matter weren’t difficult to find. A real life Park Ranger blogged about it and another Grand Canyon park interpreter said, of the hoax, something that could explain why Tom Coates was so ready to repeat the idiocy:

o insinuate a conspiratorial link between the NPS and organized religion are misguided and founded in fervent anti-Christian opposition, not reason or the law.

Annette’s finally persuaded the LSE to award her a PhD. This on top of producing Leo, seen here, and Sofia. Well done Doctor.

Weekend after next, I’m off to fly a real miltary jet helicopter simulator.

A few years ago, Helen booked me into the 737 simulator at Gatwick Airport. I flew the plane into the old Hong Airport – Kai Tak – which had a crazy approach and a hard turn onto the runway. Great fun.

Now, I have the chance to pilot a military jet helicopter. Only a simulator and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Can’t wait.

Another small victory for the forces of Unreason. From ‘The Guardian’

Packaging on homeopathic products will be allowed to describe the illnesses they claim to be able to treat under a controversial licensing scheme … but doctors and scientists say it will legitimise products that have no scientific evidence to support their claims

Homeopathic licensing alarms doctors

This is how homeopathic concoctions are prepared. The ‘remedy’ is combined with water in a succession of dilutions and shaken between each dilution, in the case of soluble substances. Originally, each dilution would be in the ratio of 1 part to 100; these days, in the West, dilutions of 1 part in 50,000 is common.

Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy, proposed 30 successive dilutions each at 1 part to 100. That is, dilution by a factor of 100³⁰, or 10⁶⁰. To consume a single molecule of a homeopathic remedy at at this 30C solution you’d need to drink about 30,000 litres of water. Chemically, a 30C solution is identical to water.

Homeopaths, undeterred by arithmetic, try to fight their corner. For example, a recent press statement from the Society of Homeopaths objects to Professor Michael Baum’s calling homeopathy an ‘implausible‘ treatment with no convincing evidence of effectiveness:

This is like licensing a witches’ brew as a medicine so long as the bat wings are sterile

Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery, University College London

The Society pointed to ‘a large study at the end of 2005, of the outcomes from 6,500 patients at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital, over a period of six years, in which 75% reported improvement‘.

In fact, this ‘study’ at Bristol was no more than a customer satisfaction survey. It did not used a control group, a particularly problemmatic omission as many of the presenting conditions were chronic and/or cyclical and would have shown some improvement anyway. It demonstrated selection bias, as only patients who had elected to receive homeopathic treatment were interviewed. There was no initial assessment of the patients at the start, so the study is subject to recall bias. Patients may be inclined to supply answers the assume the researcher is looking for, introducing another bias. Patients who attended a first appointment but who didn’t return were ignored.

And this is the first study the homeopaths turned to to defend their hokum.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Links:

• Wikipedia, Homeopathy
• Excluding Bias, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science
• Society of Witchcraft Homeopaths

Former terrorist Gerry Adams has had an invitation to a shindig at the Victoria and Albert Museum withdrawn because it was felt he was not a suitable guest.

Most people accept Gerry Adams is/was a member of the pIRA and a member of their Army Council. I wouldn’t ask him to my party – just imagine that irritating voice yapping at you across the trifle – and you might have thought a man who was comfortable organising the bombing of innocent civilians might have not protested against a perceived slight over a party invitation and instead have spent his time making reparation for the lives his actions blighted.

Nope.

Robert Elms introducing popsters Spandau Ballet at the Scala, Kings Cross:

From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet

This man has made a living from writing…good news for us all.

In FS2004 I make a lovely takeoff, climb steadily to 2,000ft, level out, set revs, maintain speed but then however much I try I can’t manage the steep turn within the limits. I think it’ supposed to be at 45-50° maintaining height within 100ft and speed with 10mph either way and I think I’ve done it but I always fail.

Passing this course will be necessary for when I have to take over the piloting of our 747 to Washington after the pilot and all other crew fall victim to the shellfish. Anyone got any hints?

As I rebuild the WordPress theme for this site I’m trying to keep the markup nicely semantic. For those who don’t understand, the idea is to use only semantic tags in the markup – HTML tags that mean something in the context of the document, rather than HTML devoted to, say, presentation.

One thing I’ve done is to take my navigation and site title elements to the physical end of the generated HTML file and used CSS to move it for presentation purposes to the top. Search engines then should dive straight into content rather than negotiating a list of site links and the website title and/or banner.

It’s worth remembering, when wondering why people bother with accessible, semantic markup, that search engines approach your site much as a blind person might. If for no other reason than self-interest, making your markup semantic and accessible helps promote your content to Google.