cloudsoup

I welcome liberal arts graduates’ forays into science, I do. I thought it brave and provactive of John Carey, erstwhile Merton Professor of Modern English at Oxford, to declare that the most imaginative and interesting writing in recent times was in the sciences, or produced by popularisers of science.

That said, when I read even a throwaway remark like this:

BBC News reports that the gene that allows most Westerners to consume cow milk effectively only appeared in the last few thousand years
Apparently it gave humans such an enormous advantage that it subsequently spread like wildfire through Western Europe.

Tom Coates, links for 2007-02-28

I shudder. It reminds of the time I was my University’s captain on the quiz show University Challenge, back when the question master was Bamber Gascoigne. I asked him in the green room (wine and free fags) why the programme didn’t have more science questions. “We don’t consider science to be part of general knowledge”, he drawled.

Since then, in the reincarnated version of University Challenge, Gascoigne’s replacement, fearsome political interviewer Jeremy Paxman stumbles bravely through the many science and maths questioned now included. A good thing too.

Science is beginning to win the day, and it pulls the Arts in its wake – and the so-called Social Sciences are reeling under the onslaught of sheer empiricism and sense, the confusion so memorably and amusingly exemplified by the great Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax.

There are setbacks. The speedy departure of Larry Summers from Havard after his defensible remarks about contributory factors to the predominance of men in senior faculty positions in Maths and Sciences was a deplorable but temporary burp from the self-ordained progressive, noisy and supposedly left-leaning bien-pensants.

The facts are the facts. Read Nick Cohen’s recent interview with Simon Baron-Cohen about autism and the ‘male brain’. The things Baron-Cohen is saying now simply could not have been said a few years ago. Witness the disgusting treatment meted out to E.O.Eilson when he wrote Sociobiology: The Modern Synthesis.

So back to the point. Things Arts graduate might bear in mind. The BBC is never in the vanguard of Science reporting and more often than not gets it wrong.

The emergence of the lactase persistence variant is a relatively recent evolutionary event, appearing in Northern Europeans only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago (approximately with the time that animals were domesticated).

Nutrigenomics, reporting on a study in PubMed dated February 2002

The Prince of Wales has appeared to criticise fast food chain McDonald’s at the launch of a public health campaign in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

During a tour of a diabetes centre in Abu Dhabi, he told a nutritionist that banning the restaurants was “key”.

BBC, Royal rebuke over McDonald’s food

This is an example of the wealthy, intolerant parasite’s eating habits:

The Menu

Canapés

Pan-seared diver-caught Scottish scallops wrapped in Duchy farm bacon and skewered with rosemary.

Old English-style carpaccio of rare breed Aberdeen Angus beef (hung for 30 days) with Highgrove organic beetroots and horseradish crème fraiche.

Tartare of Highgrove lamb fillet with reggiano classico Parmesan, lemon thyme tips and Fontodi extra virgin olive oil.

A spoon of fantastic English wild mushrooms sautéed with first of the season black truffles.

Dinner

Bread made with Duchy flour and Duchy biscuits.

Starter

Oozy Risotto of autumn squash with Duchy smoked bacon and crisp sage.

Main course

“Amazing Highgrove Lamb” cooked two ways; shoulder slowly braised and loin pan-roasted rare, served with organic garden vegetables from the Duchy farm, Dauphinoise-style potatoes and Jamie’s “Essex” sauce.

Dessert

Duchy Cambridge Cream with damson compote and smashed Duchy shortbread.

Duchy & English cheeses.

Coffee and Duchy chocolates.

Jug-eared dimwit stuffs himself

• Emmerdale plane crash: Jews “had prior warning”

  More than a dozen Jewish farm workers stayed at home as a plane crashed into the sleepy Yorkshire village of Emmerdale in 1993, according to a new film released today. The 70 minute film, ‘Emmerdale – the Israeli Connection’…

  from Olly’s Onions

Although similar ideas may go right the way back to Aristotle, it was only relatively recently that Garrett Hardin published in Science his famous and much-discussed essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. It’s had a profound impact since – possibly because of the snappy title.

Science magazine has a special issue online that republishes the original essay and responses from a suprisingly wide range of academic subjects.

Hardin has been misrepresented – or the idea has been misrepresented – by the more swivel-eyed evangelicals and the point he was making about the ‘tragedy’ applied to an unregulated commons. Still, since I came across it, it’s made me more amenable to arguments about, say, road tolls.

After coming across a problem when the new design went online I thought I ought to mention, just to be fair, it seems much faster now and I am using it more than I did before.

Still one or two problems, though.

For example, the front news page site failed validation with 109 errors when I tried it – it looks very much as if someone didn’t graps the difference between STRICT and TRANSITIONAL in the DocType.

Then again, I seem to have a few problems here, largely to do with not putting <p> immedately after my <blockquote> and not escaping my &’s.

Then the markup, even though they’ve bust a gut to use CSS, is hardly what you’d call semantic:

<div class="puff-top clear"></div><div class="padding-top-10">&lt/div>

Eh?

It’s not an easy job…but they could do better.

• Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion

further down that article is the terrifying news that some cats have evolved opposable thumbs. People are worried about genetically modified potatoes when we are sharing this planet with a sub-population of Felis catus that can manipulate tools?

PooterGeek, An Abomination Unto The Lord

• Danny Finkelstein in The Times, on the raving lunatics of Iran and the International Jewish Propaganda that is Tom and Jerry.

• In part, that’s because Female Genital Mutilation is at once a matter of women’s rights and of cultural self-determination — many who are disturbed by the practice are also troubled by the idea of passing judgment on another culture’s customs.

  Cultural relativism and cliterodectomy as a parent’s right : Rites and wrongs, The Boston Globe

• “I have a perfectly good system. I take all the socks out of the dryer and throw them into my sock drawer”.

  “Thats not a system”.

  “It’s a perfectly good system. It’s called ‘late binding.’”

  Dive Into Mark, Late Binding

• Flickr problems again. Flickr’s playing up this evening – lots of failures to connect, timeouts. This after the dreadful problem with the cacheing servers a few days ago. Must read Cal Henderson’s, ‘Data Normalization is for Sissies‘ again…

• Sydney-based Easy Being Green says it will mitigate your cat’s flatulent contribution to global warming for A$8 ($6). The same company could also make your granny “carbon-neutral” at A$10 a year, according to a report in the Australian newspaper last weekend.

  Bloomberg, China, India Smile as West Overpays for Climate

• Laidlaw, 24, who had earlier threatened to “kill all black people”, was found guilty of three counts of attempted murder.

  Judge Samuel Wiggs said Laidlaw “intended to kill” his victims, but they were not racially-motivated attacks.

  “Although both people you aimed at were black I make no finding that your crimes were racially motivated,” he said.

  BBC, Life for gunman captured on CCTV

• Whenever the word ontology is used in a technical context, what is being promoted is likely of limited practical value.

  Peter’s 2nd Law of Computing

• Judge Ayman al-Akazi sentenced Abdel Kareem Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad and inciting sectarian strife and another year for insulting President Hosni Mubarak

  Washington Post, Egyptian Blogger Gets 4 Years in Prison

Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution has dug up a corker about the poor Independent newspaper.

This gorgeous Emiliano Godoy-designed knit chair is typical of the San-Fran store’s socially conscious philosophy; it’s fashioned from two key materials – Forestry Stewardship Council-certified oak and a ball of cotton rope – by the Pirwi people of Mexico, who receive regular visits from the store’s directors.

THE50BEST: Ethical buys byt Kate Thomas for The Independent

Leaving aside the cost of the chair – £3,268.69 – Scott’s been doing some anthropological research on the Pirwi people .

There is no indigenous group called the ‘Pirwi people’. But there is a Mexico City based design and manufacturing company called Pirwi.

Still, it sounded nice to Indie readers, no doubt.

We went on a long walk through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, along the James Irvine Trail, down through the forest to the Pacific Ocean.

We didn’t climb the trees but this guy did…

• I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

  Henry David Thoreau

• Nozick, briefly