Hattix

It’s a question I’ve asked (and answered) often on my blog. A knee-jerk over-reaction, what does it achieve?

In the case of threats to our freedom, we’re happily destroying that freedom to protect it. Better we sink our own ship it seems.

But it works elsewhere too. Civitas, a social think-tank, have run a comprehensive study showing that our headless chicken reaction to the supposed threat posed by paedophiles is achieving precisely the opposite of what we’d like it to.

Adults are now scared of interacting with children, paedophile has the same social stigma attached that rapist once did; A conviction isn’t necessary, just a suspicion, an accusation, and an innocent life is ruined. The innocent life isn’t that of the child’s, children are well versed at saying what needs to be said, true or otherwise, to get attention: It’s that of the man or woman accused of abuse.

According to Civitas, the spectre of suspicion and distrust has achieved exactly what it was meant to protect. It has poisoned and destroyed the generation relationship between child and adult. Children are now without adult friends, friends who would recognise signs of real abuse perhaps better than the child or his peers or his parents (parents who famously have a rather polar view of their own offspring) would, increasing the ease at which real paedophiles may take advantage of them. Isolated and ostracised the child has nobody external and impartial to turn to or confide in. In our rabid panic, we have spurned the children.

As we busy ourselves in crying wolf over our obsession that children are sexual in some way or that anyone with a camera is clearly a kiddy fiddler, we don’t tend to notice that we’re making paedophiles of normal people. In 2003 it became illegal, very much so, to document a perfectly legal act for the first time ever. If Jack is a normal 16 year old and his girlfriend Jill is a normal 17 year old, they can have a sexual relationship as much as they like. But if Jill sends Jack some naughty pictures of herself to brighten his day when he’s at work, Jack is then a paedophile and may be jailed or worse. His marriage plans to Jill are now off, his plan to work as a doctor won’t ever happen and Jill’s ambition to work as a care assistant is wrecked as neither would pass a CRB check.

Paedophiles wreck lives. In our blind panic, we wreck young lives just as badly. So what does over-reaction achieve? Is it not the precise damage that it was aimlessly attempting to prevent? Who’s worse?

It’s been a while so I have two stories for you.

The first needs no attribution, it’s all over the news. The Government somehow, with great concessions made (bribes), managed to get the controversial 42-day detention bill through Parliament. The Government are trying to spin it as powers needed by the police to combat the “terrorism threat”.

What “terrorism threat”?

We didn’t need to hold an innocent man for six weeks while the well-organized US-funded IRA were bombing the shit out of metropolitan areas nationwide. Yet we do when a rag tag bunch of rabid extremists post vague videos on the Internet?

The Government has proven time and again that it will abuse the Terrorism Act 2006, using its power to spy on citizens dropping litter, on babies crying at night, to monitor private areas…The list goes on.

‘Disappearing’ people for six weeks with neither evidence nor charge is unacceptable.

Our second is related to the exploding Nimrod in Afghanistan. The MoD yesterday flew a Nimrod over London to salute the Queen’s official birthday and, predictably, the relatives of the servicemen lost in Afghanistan are in uproar.

But wait, that’s not the whole story.

While the coroner of the investigation deemed the Nimrod “unairworthy”, he was not an aeronautical engineer, he was not familiar with the DeHaviland Comet or the Nimrod (the Nimrod is a militarised version of the Comet) and likely not familiar with the Nimrod’s essential role in supporting ground forces.

The experts, the aeronautical engineers, the Nimrod designers, the Nimrod ground crew, the people who know what they’re talking about all insist that the Nimrod is one of the safest and most reliable planes in the fleet. We employ experts for a reason.

Here in Britain, the Government has no direct say over education. An organisation of professional teachers, educators, experts, define the national curriculum which all students are tested against. There are caveats, many I do not like, such as that government funding goes to religious schools which is a horrendous abuse of taxpayer money to merely further a non-educational aganda.

My readers in the States are not so lucky. It seems that most states have a Board of Education, elected to place based on how well they can campaign and many of them aren’t even educators by trade but career politicians using it as a stepping stone. The perfect platform from which to launch a war on education.

In Texas, Don McLeroy heads their BoE and is perhaps the least qualified person to do so. He’s devoutly anti-education, a Young-Earth Creationist and most likely a Flat-Earther. This is a man who thinks that reality is taught in The Bible, The Koran, The Torah, The Talmund… A man who wants mythology to take the place of reality in the classroom.

It should come as no surprise then, that his latest exploits managed to perk the attention of this usually UK-centric blog (I’m getting there, I promise!). In three years, a panel of experts, teachers and educators were revising the English curriculum for Texas. This work of 36 months was then totally ignored and a small insular group of ’social conservatives’ wrote a new one up right there and then, according to their own beliefs and agendas. Politicians, not educators, not teachers, invented a new curriculum with little to no educator or teacher backing overnight.

It doesn’t stop there. This trainwreck carried on through the BoE, McLeroy actually dismissed members who raised concerns that he was rushing through and denied counter-arguments to be made. 9-6, the new ’standards’ were forced past.

Now you may be wondering, what do a bunch of foreigners who decide they don’t want to teach English have to do with us? Well first off, it’s the invasion of education being led by the religious right. They want to indoctrinate children early and often; Science (oh boy, this’ll make for some fun posts) is next on the agenda.

Most importantly this tells us all what damage religion can do when allowed into education. These are people who don’t privately live their own lives according to whatever book they worship, but want to force that onto other people, onto their innocent children. Does this seem evil? Only something that distant foreigners would do? It’s happening here and now in the UK! Already the government, free to sponsor whatever schools it likes, funds Christian, Muslim, Jewish schools who have a very tenuous grasp of reality and teach their dogma as science! To make matters worse, that dogma is then forced through examinations under anti-discriminaton laws.

In the UK we taxpayers do not just pay for religions we may not agree with, but we subvert the worth of our childrens’ education. Is “Allah did it” as valid an education as a thorough understanding of Genetics and Evolution? The Government wants you to think it is and it’s made laws to make sure it is. Your child, busting his nut to learn his Science, gains the exact same grade as a student at some church school who writes “because my god said so”.

It must end. Religion has its place, but that place is not in any publically funded sector. Public funds must not be used to forward any religious agenda. Let us not continue making the mistakes that our backwards American cousins are making today. Let’s prove that we can do it better.

Are we off the hook? Has nature conspired to save us from our mistakes? No warming for over a decade? Is this great news?

The answer to all the above is “no”. It’s terrible news. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany believe that a natural cycle of cooling will offset partly or completely any warming over the next decade or so. This may initially sound great, a stay of reprieve, but it’s anything but. The findings are largely a result of increased cloud cover caused by increased storms caused by climate change superimposed onto a small existing cycle. It’s bad news because it gives politicians several terms where they have a ‘look at the last five years’ excuse not to do anything; Give a politician the choice of doing something and doing nothing and he’ll do nothing every time.

What’s worse is that change after the cycle is over will be rapid and that it does not affect high latitudes. Antarctica will still lose ice shelf after ice shelf. Arctic pack ice will still be all but gone in five years.

 When the sun dawns on 2020 and the crutch holding us up collapses, do you think we’ll be ready? Call me a pessimist, but I sure don’t.

You know what puzzles most genetic scientists? That there’s any controversy at all. After reading about a field of GM potatoes being grown nearby to myself I figured I’d do my bit to set the record straight.

There never was and never will be any health risk to humans from GM foods. It’s quite simply impossible. There is, however, quite a large health risk to humans from starvation.

The high priests of the anti-GM movement (Largely “greens”, paradoxically) have founded what approaches religion with their hate filled rhetoric which has no foundation in reason or fact.

 The basics of genetic modification are really simple. Genes control what proteins a cell manufactures and how. What we do is take a section of this control code that does something we want it to do and add it to the existing code. In the above link, the potatoes, the scientists took a gene which makes the potato roots emit a certain chemical, which nematode worms use to locate roots to eat. They then broke the gene so it doesn’t work; The roots no longer emit that chemical, the worms can’t find them, the potatoes aren’t killed.

We could do, and have done, the exact same with selective breeding. If you think your pet dog isn’t genetically modified, think again. It’s not a wolf, we genetically engineered it into the dog by thousands of years of selective breeding; This is genetic modification. Same for the cow from the auroch. The pig from the boar, the chicken, the turkey, all staples on our dinner tables, all genetically modified and not found in nature.

What science is giving us are tools to do those same modifications in years rather than in millennia. Now we can directly modify the traits and characteristics of plants and animals; A good example are fungal infections in plants. We can spray on bacteria which poison the fungus, or we can include the genetic code from the bacteria which produces that fungicide into the plant’s own genome and make plants which are immune to the fungus and we don’t need to spray on the bacteria.

So what’s the problem? Well, we make ’supercrops’ which could escape into the wild and out-compete native plants. Which, of course, we’ve been doing for millennia! Rapeseed plants (Canola over the Atlantic) are springing up all over the European countryside. Wheat grows wild, but doesn’t even exist in nature. This environmental ‘disaster’ that the high priests of anti-GM preach their sermons on isn’t just a ‘disaster’ but it’s already happened and has been since we first invented agriculture 8,000 years ago! As we can see just by looking outside (I can anyway), the original forest of Britain has been almost entirely obliterated to make room for agriculture. The prairie of the US has had its herds of bison massacred and wheat planted, roads cut across it.

We’ve already done the disaster. Let’s just make the best use of the land we’ve claimed so we don’t need more. Genetic engineering allows us to make that best use. The anti-GM high priests would rather have us slash and burn rainforests than be content with what we have already; With that objective in mind, can they ever label themselves ‘environmentalist’ with a straight face?

It’s a rule of reality, the more controversy something generates, the more idiots are attracted to it. I should name that after myself: Wayne’s Law of Stupidity.

 Grand Theft Auto IV is upon us and we have the usual crazies jumping out of the woodwork. Jack Thompson’s in there, as always, trying to play the media for all its worth with his tired old ‘murder simulator’ rhetoric and at least he takes issue with the violence.

Make no mistake, GTA is about violence. Alright, so is almost every other video game available anywhere, in some form or another, but GTA sells best so attracts the most parasites.

 It all started when the kids who shot up Columbine were found to have played DoomII. That’s rather like finding out that they used guns or that they ate food, what kid that age didn’t play DoomII? Do they want to ban food as well as games? 

To the parasites’ credit, most of them no longer have a problem with beating an innocent bystander to death with a baseball bat. No, the problem now is with the presence of strippers and prostitutes. “There are women in this game! They will corrupt our children!” scream the high-jihadists. The same dangerously psychotic people who will then give this game to their children! It’s RATED Mature, that’s 17+. No retailer should sell it to a child. So who will provide it to the children then? Their parents? Say it ain’t so!

Parents are quite happy buying their precious little snowflake DeathGoreBloodyMess II then dumping them in front of the electric nanny for a few hours while the kid gets on with digitally dismembering digital people. Only the really desperate for attention (Hi Jack!) would have any problem with that, regardless of how wrong it may be.

 That same parent then buys DeathGoreBloodyMessWithWomen II and there’s hell to pay!

Isn’t it the parent’s problem?

Posts made since the 19th of April have been lost. This is, of course, entirely my fault. I run this server, own the hardware and bandwidth. A while back, I turned off MySQL backups to isolate a problem with the backup script. You can see where this is going: I didn’t turn it back on. The server has been happily backing up everything it has except the databases.

A disk underwent some impressive filesystem corruption, so was recovered from backup: Backups which did not include the MySQL databases. MySQL was able to recover its database, but lost recent entries as a result.

 Oops.

I often wonder if there’s no spin that talentless tabloid hacks won’t put on an article to force forth their agenda. European consumer protection laws which would require faith-healers, mediums, clairvoyants and astrologers to disclose the accuracy or effectiveness of their ’service’ are being spun that “genuine religion is being discriminated against” by the ignorant hacks at the BBC News Magazine.

What is glossed over is that these scammers are selling a product which does not work. It doesn’t matter if the scammers say they believe it works, they are selling in many cases unregulated unlicensed untested medicine which performs absolutely no function. How many times have we read the stories of the children, parents taken them to faith healers, homeopathic practitioners or other ‘alternative’ medicine have died due to lack of treatment for easily curable ailments? Too many. Far too many. Jail time would be light treatment for these dregs of society.

By disguising their horrible scams (often preying on the bereaved or vulnerable I might add) as genuine religion, which it is nothing of the sort, these con-artists think they have a free ride to sell their at best useless and at worst dangerous products and schemes. If we’re jailing fake timeshare con-men and fraudsters in other endeavours, isn’t it about time we started taking a look at these fraudsters? After all, if their schemes do work and are worth selling, why are they so upset about legislation asking that they show it like any other business has to?

What’s the problem?

Shamelessly re-created from here.

Is there nothing too absurd? Finally, is there nothing too outlandish or instantly wrong that the blogosphere won’t parrot it as The Truth?

This time it’s a laughably wrong press release from an otherwise-credible British university who’d do very well to distance themselves from this quackery very quickly. An impact event, which may have been the root of the Biblical disaster of Soddom and Gomorrah (and here’s us thinking all along it wer them thar queer folk, y’all). Go on, have a read. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. I’m about to tear it to pieces so small they’ll leave no trace…

(Their words in italics)

There’s a giant landslide in Köfels, Austria which some early researchers thought was possibly related to an impact event.  This was around the time of Eugene Shoemaker’s work on impacts and the first time we started to actually realise that yes, Earth should have been hit quite a few times in its past.

But this view lost favour as a much better understanding of impact sites developed in the late 20th century. In the case of Köfels there is no crater, so to modern eyes it does not look as an impact site should look. However, the evidence that puzzled the earlier researchers remains unexplained by the view that it is just another landslide.

I did a bit of background reading here, what evidence puzzled us? It turns out that there’s a lot of glass in the landslide material as well as shocked quartz. You don’t get shocked quartz quite like this from any other process. Not even a supervolcano has the amount of pressure required. If you have shocked quartz, you have an impact, it’s that simple.

Or is it?

Well, no it isn’t. Quartz is very hard and highly resilient. It survives most erosive processes and can be transported by them for thousands of miles. Shocked quartz tells you there was an impact event and, if enough of it in a given stratum, when it happened. Of crucial importance, it doesn’t tell you where.

There is a large (by normal standards, you can find shocked quartz literally anywhere from any one of the millions of impacts Earth has suffered) quantity of shocked quartz in the material from the Köfels landslide. It being a landslide, of course, we don’t have clearly demarcated strata to give us a date. The quartz could have been formed millions of years ago.

The glass, however, was not. We can date that quite accurately. We use numerous methods and put an upper and a lower bound, independently, on it. We get bounds of 16,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago. That’s fairly recent, but glass is formed all the time on Earth. A good landslide has a lot, a hell of a lot, of energy. This actually melts the rock inside it and forms glass! All that rock rubbing against each other during the landslide, powered by a mighty fall, manages to heat through friction hot enough to melt. We should expect glass at such a landslide and indeed we find it. This is not evidence of an astrobleme (a formation caused by an impact event).

Of course we learned a lot about astroblemes and their effects on Earth since Shoemaker’s pioneering work. Glass and shocked quartz can only form from a ground impact. Not only that, but a pretty hard one. The Köfels site is quite a bit larger than the famous Barringer Crater in Arizona which, a Google Image Search will quickly tell you, is very recognisable. It’s also five times older than the Köfels event.

That’s the summary. Here’s the rebuttal, where I get my fun.

It was found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the Royal Place at Nineveh, and was made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC. It is an astronomical work as it has drawings of constellations on it and the text has known constellation names. It has attracted a lot of attention but in over a hundred years nobody has come up with a convincing explanation as to what it is.

Nobody knows what it is in over a hundred years, but it’s an astronomical work. Eh? Assyrian scribes used well understood languages and even at 700BC, pre-dating the Old Testament, the language wasn’t that archaic that we can’t translate it. If we don’t know what it is, how do we know it’s astronomical?

With modern computer programmes[sic] that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

Go download Stellarium. It’s free, open source and very good. Planetarium software has been around for the last twenty years that I know of and most likely much longer. That’s your “modern computer programme”. Now, why would an Assyrian scribe be copying out the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer 2,400 years before him? Why would he even know the language? Could you read a language we used 2,400 years ago, such as Ancient Hebrew; No, you can’t, not perfectly or without ambiguity. If you could, there are a LOT of Biblical theologians who’d like a very close chat with you. Can you imagine how difficult it’d be for a scribe in 700 BC to manage such a feat?

No reason is given for our Assyrian scribe’s diligent historical documentation.

Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night, but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space.

There are two points here. First, “the same as any other night” means we have a lot more ‘pages’ from this notebook, but we’re given our answer…
…has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time…

Woah, maybe not. Now is this tablet mysterious and untranslated, or do we have a whole load of other tablets to compare it to? We can’t have both, yet this is exactly what the press release just said.

Now secondly we have an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it’s in space. If I quickly do a spot of maths, we can put it, say, 1,000km up and it’d be about 4km across and still discernible as a distinct shape. It could be 500km up and 1km across, that’s fine too, if possibly moving a little bit too fast; Consider that a lower bound since at orbital velocity it’d cover that 500km in about three seconds. No problems there, but do take notes.

The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.

Certainly possible even by naked eye methods. We can ignore the atmosphere because it’s just not going to alter the path of something larger than about 500m travelling between 20km/s and 50km/s, it’s through the atmosphere in a matter of seconds. Then we can just integrate back into an orbit. An error of one degree is pretty huge for an orbit, but we can get a very vague idea of the direction the object was travelling (but we can only guess at its velocity really). So tell us more…

…the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth[sic], that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

Uh oh. Atens do not orbit “close to the earth”, they simply have a semimajor axis inside Earth’s orbit. They cross Earth’s orbit, that’s it. Some of them do anyway. There’s nothing about resonance and, indeed, a resonant object would never impact Eath, because it’s resonant!

This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming[sic] angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point.

Wow. Just…wow. It’s not possible to be more wrong in a single sentence than the sentence beginning “The in coming…”, it just can’t be done.

First off, we have to vapourise AT LEAST a kilometer wide asteroid. Now remember Newton’s laws? Of course you do. Whatever force vapourised that asteroid was IMMENSE, provided by the mountain. However, there’s an equal and opposite force provided by the asteroid on the mountain. The mountain would be not just rubble, but a crater at least seven kilometers wide. You cannot “clip” a mountain at over twenty kilometers a second, vapourise an entire kilometer (remember, that’s a lower bound) asteroid and still be left with a mountain or, indeed, anything near the mountain.

Refutation one: The mountain still exists and it should not. An impact solid enough to vapourise that much rock (or metal, if iron-nickel asteroid) is more than enough to vapourise five mountains.

As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide).

Continuing the trainwreck, we have a five-kilometer ball of superheated plasma, rock fragments and general badness, presumably with a sizable proportion of its initial 20-50 kilometer PER SECOND velocity. Everything between that mountain and Köfels would have been utterly obliterated by the air shockwaves alone. We’d see a layer of soot in the valley floor, recently of course, about a foot thick.

Refutation two: The valley is just as it was when the last glaciers were retreating 10,000 years ago. It should not be.

Refutation three: The valley should contain tremendous proportions of sidereophile elements, such as iridium. It does not.

When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.

Well this wasn’t written by a geologist that’s for sure. It doesn’t matter if you hurl a ton of rock or a ton of feathers at a surface, you still hit it just as hard with just the same energy. Just pulverising the rock? Five kilometers down, perhaps, but locally on the surface? No. A five kilometer wide ball of twenty kilometer per second superheated debris is going to leave a hell of a mark. We call these marks craters. It doesn’t matter if you get one crater, or two, or six, or sixty thousand microcraters (in, for example, quartz, sand and glass). At that kind of speed, you get craters. And when you get craters, you get the stuff blown out of them. The stuff blown out doesn’t much care for the initial direction of the impactor as to where it goes, it’s more or less symmetrical along the line of flight, as much goes back as goes forwards.

Refutation four: WHAT? You can’t support a point using physics that doesn’t work! The ejecta blanket would be at least twenty metres thick, where is it?

Refutation five: We see oblique craters on the Moon, Mars and Mercury too, but they’re only formed by impacts under around three degrees, not six.

No amount of literary sleight of hand or abuse of physics can hide a complete ignorance of the laws of physics. So okay, let’s burden on through this cesspool of wrong.

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

He’s clumsily describing an ejecta fall-out. Molten rock falling from the sky after being blasted up there by…by the formation of a crater. Oops. Also, where are the burns? We’re quite interested in the archaeology of 4,100 years ago and do numerous digs, but we don’t find people immolated, we don’t find soot and ash from trees. The predictions made by this theory just are not supported by evidence.

Why, also, do people not record the next ten years or next century as “the years without summer”? I don’t care how you do it or what happens on the way in, you dump the kinetic energy of a kilometer of asteroid on Earth and you’re going to make a hell of a mess. Stuff’s going to go flying everywhere and fine dust will linger in the high atmosphere for decades. A few poxy volcanoes can trigger global temperature drops, imagine what a kilometer (at least!) of asteroid can do!

Guess what? Our two researchers (one a rocket engine engineer, the other a space infrastructure engineer, NEITHER geologists or linguists) have a book for sale about it all! They never do explain why the glass was formed at least 8,000 years ago and their magic happened 4,100 years ago.

Because a hillside falling away as the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago is just too boring and happened in too many places around Europe.