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The BBC has reported that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with thallium, which The Telegraph decided was a liquid; then the Beeb suggested the poison was radioactive thallium; then became very excited over unusual objects appearing on his X-rays, though how the BBC had seen his X-rays and why they were breaching the usual confidentiality rules, they didn’t say.

The mystery of the mysterious objects mysteriously vanished as the BBC changed its mind again and decided that Litvinenko had been poisoned with Polonium.

I really don’t think this has been sensible reporting. Now, the BBC News 24 channel is telling me not to panic. As Alpha particles are readily stopped by a sheet of paper and I live around 140 miles away from the sushi bar in Piccadilly Circus in which Litvinenko was poisoned, I wasn’t feeling terribly concerned for my own health in any case.

The UK retailer Dixons/Currys has a rather mixed reputation. Some say the sales staff aren’t as well-trained as they might be, or that they push extra warrantees for the commission, and there are stories of poor after-sales service all over the web.

But, but, but. I’ve just bought a Nikon D80 from their website with no trouble at all. It was very competitively priced and delivered on time. So, tentatively, thumbs up for Dixons. I’d buy from them again.

Lincoln’s statue at Hodgenville

If you’re brought up in the USA you’ll know these words by heart. If you’re a small-government libertarian type you might not be too keen on Lincoln for his record. But for us in, say, the UK, still under the yoke of a constitutional monarchy, with soverign powers exercised by what Lord Hailsham memorably called an elected dictatorship, with a long history but no abiding idea to unite us, these words, spoken one hundred and forty-three years ago today, are stirring. Well, they stir me:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

Helen’s keen on rust, dirt, decay, broken windows – you know the sort of thing:

Padlock, on one of Helen’s Flickr accounts

And then there’s this, looking like, ooh, a couple of Millet^* peasants, if I were to be a bit pretentious about it:

Jumblers

Her pro account is here.

I’m reluctant to admit it but I think her eye for composition is better than mine. Sometimes I’ll take the odd Ok photo but it usually happens by pointing the camera at a spectacular vista that couldn’t be messed up. For instance:

Yosemite with Fat Guy

And even then I’m not sure of the fat guy. Is he wistful, does his lone presence enhance the scene? Or does he remind you of a little escapee from a cartoon?

I’m looking forward to seeing what Helen will do with this

Nikon D80

being delivered shortly, for her birthday.

She’s currently using a Canon Powershot A620 for digital snaps, and it’s fine for what it is, but she has previously used a film SLR and she’s been humming and haahing over making the move to SLR digital for several years now. The D80′s halfway between an entry-level digital SLR and a semi-professional model like the Nikon D200 so it should serve her well while she’s relearning real photography (hyperfocal distance and circle of confusion, anyone?)

Then of course we’ll have to travel to some spectacular photographic location. We’ve been in the habit of taking a short break abroad a few months into the year and I’m wondering if Iceland or Norway would do.

Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang has decided to treat his fellow space travellers to dried elk meat

The Local

I tried dried elk in Estonia earlier this year. In the middle of Tallinn’s old town is a tourist restaurant that lays on the medieval schtick. You sit at wooden benches, eat with sharp daggers and drink mead. The dried elk itself comes served in a coarse-weave bag tied with a leather thong, the sort of pouch you’d expect to see dangling from Friar Tuck’s waist.

Tallinn Rooftops

The meat was slightly brittle but became chewy if you perservered – and then you’d be able to taste it, which isn’t neccessarily a good thing.

The story from The Local mentions that tastes are not so strong in space. Is this true? Maybe so. NASA says:

Since people first began eating in space, they have noticed that things taste differently while in orbit. Some astronauts find that their food is bland. Others find that their favorite foods don’t taste good. And, some astronauts enjoy eating certain foods that they normally wouldn’t eat. Still, other astronauts say they can’t tell any difference at all.

and apparently there are several theories including a sense of stuffiness or congestion cause by blood spreading evenly around the body, and the more prosaic suggestion that the food’s been stored for a long time.

Check out Flickr’s new maps for London. This is stunningly good stuff… Yahoo and Flickr now have good maps for Britain and the rest of Europe as well, which should help the whole geotagging thing really fly outside the US. I’ve known this was coming for a while, but it doesn’t make its arrival any less welcome…

Tom Coates on Flickr’s maps

Er… maybe. Flickr/Yahoo is still, in fact, well behind Google in the quality of the mapping not that you’d know it from Tom Coates but then, of course, he works for Yahoo…

I while back I cited Venice as an example of the difference in map quality. Well, Yahoo’s got better, true. Here’s Flickr, now:

Flickr’s version St Mark’s Square

and here’s Google’s:

Google’s version St Mark’s Square

and I think you’ll agree that Google still wins hands down. In fact, although this is the highest zoom possible in Flickr/Yahoo, Google zooms in further:

Google, St Mark’s Square, full zoom

I hope Flickr catches up soon.

The real thing, incidentally, is beautiful, of course, and when we visited in an unseasonably clear and warm(ish) February, quite magical. Here’s Helen’s photo:

the Piazza San Marco

The media-savvy Archbishop of York – the most senior cleric in the CofE after the Archbishop of Canterbury – has had a go at the BBC:

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has accused the BBC of bias against Christianity and says the broadcaster fears a terrorist backlash if it is critical of Islam.

The archbishop, the second most senior figure in the Church of England’s hierarchy, said Christians took “more knocks” than other faiths at the hands of the BBC.

“They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims,” he said. “We are fair game because they can get away with it. We don’t go down there and say, ‘We are going to bomb your place.’ That is not in our nature.

Daiy Telegraph, BBC frightened of criticising Islam, says archbishop

Now, I’m no fan of religions in general or Christianity in particular; but I would suggest that Dr Sentamu’s missing a point here, that mainstream Christians aren’t fair game because the rest of us can get away with it but rather that mainstream Christianity is mature enough to accept the need to engage in reasoned debate in our essentially secular society, rather than demand a right to be taken seriously just by making preposterous assertions.

Some people, though, who might be expected to understand very well the nature of freedom and diversity in a liberal society, display a irresponsible lack of toleration that’s quite staggering. For Tom Coates for example:

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

Tom Coates, plasticbag

Don’t like it? Ban it.

Stephen Jay Gould published the collection of essays Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes way back in 1984, 22 years ago; so when the National Geographic recently published an article headlined Dolphin With Four Fins May Prove Terrestrial Origins I was less than suprised, except by the exaggerated claims for the significance of the find. As Jan Haugland wrote recently about the same story,

I wonder if the scientists or whoever wrote the press release have exaggerated the importance of this discovery for added publicity. It is surely an interesting find, but the land ancestry of whales was not something that needed much further evidence

Indeed. There’s already overwhelming evidence that whales and dolphins descend from land-based animals not the least of which is the fact that mammals arose on land and cetaceans are mammals.

C – the undeveloped hind legs of a baleen whale, from Meyers Konversionlexikon 1888

Some of the more impressionable – or forgetful – news sources seem to think this is a great breakthrough, though:

The ABC radio news announcer introduced it as A sign, that maybe, once, mammals that live in the ocean, once walked on land”
Maybe? Ya don’t say? Wow, I never woulda thunk it!

comment on Pharyngula

The trouble with vestigial organs or better yet, atavisms, is that creationists decline to interpret them sensibly. For example, the Young-Earth creationists at AnswersInGenesis have no problem shrugging off supposed vestigial limbs, or throwbacks, or atavisms, having already successfully ignored modern physics, cosmology, geology, paleontology, and just about every other area of science that suggests the Earth’s older than about 10,000 years. When it comes to evidence from biology, creationists, like the Red Queen, easily believe six impossible things before breakfast:

This teaching is based on an assumption that is then passed off as science, an assumption that the ancestry and function of the structure is known.

young-Earth creationists, AnswersInGenesis

With such ideology-driven idiocy, anybody suggesting that an odd dolphin might prove to anyone still needing proof the fact of evolution by Natural Selection is woefully deluding themselves. The blogger Tom Coates, for example, writes:

If there are people that are unconvinced, there is something that needs to be demonstrated. Taking advantage of news stories to do this seems to be an obvious thing to do

Tom Coates, plasticbag.org

Which seems to seriously misunderstand the nature of creationism. There’s already a wealth of evidence and it hasn’t worked.

In passing, Coates takes an opportunity to take a swipe at Americans: In the meantime, sir (sic), you should know that half of America doesn’t believe in evolution. Coates appears either to be unaware of a BBC poll:

Just under half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll

the BBC, Britons unconvinced on evolution

or else is rather dishonestly having a go at Americans in particular because that’s what a certain type of liberal European likes to do.

I think Tom Coates, unfortunately, champions of a strain of thinking that represents facts as postures to adopt that signify an allegiance to a political position. I think that’s why Tom tries to alarm his audience about the US while he ignores the apparently similar problems at home.

Incidentally, should you leave a comment on Coates’s weblog you might find yourself the recipient of an uninvited email like this:

Please fuck off!

Please continue fucking off!

And when you’ve finished fucking off, could you please fuck off some more!

Tom Coates

The Onion, as so often, gets to the heart of the news:

WASHINGTON, DC—After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday’s midterm election, taking all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, retaining a majority with 100 out of 100 seats in the Senate, and pushing political candidates to victory in each of the 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs.

Schmap is producing ‘dynamic’ online travel guides and is using CC-licenced photos from Flickr. Some Flicker folk are confused about a possible commercial reuse of non-commercial photos but Schmap seems to be legit and anyway, anybody approached about their photos can always say no.

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Here’s the photo by Helen that Schmap’s asked to reproduce – and she’s happy with that. It’s of the Natural History museum in Oxford – lots of dinosaurs with the pleasant suprise of the eccentric but unmissable Pitt-Rivers museum stuck on the back.