Hattix

This is my blog. Obvious enough, isn’t it? I’m going to cover a hell of a lot of topics, all the way from the intricacies of computer hardware to the nuances of science (with the occasional kicking at religion). This isn’t a focused blog, it’s the barely-coherent ravings of a mad skeptic.

 So I post now after hearing perhaps the most incredibly stupid thing that could be thought. It goes like this, and I do not make this up. “Science tells us how, religion tells us why”. No, really. That apple that fell? God did it, not gravity. The Galapagos finches? God did it, not evolution. Moon went around Earth? God did it, not orbital mechanics.

 This isn’t just laughably stupid, it’s dangerous thinking. Religion, really, is just pretending. They can’t even properly answer the question of, out of the three thousand other gods, spirits, deities, demiurges that mankind has ever invented, why their particular one is so special and better than all the others. This is dangerous, it’s ignorant and it has and will cause suffering, death and war.

You either take the world and fit your ideas around it, changing those ideas if the world doesn’t agree or take your ideas and fit the world around it, ignoring the world if it doesn’t agree. I think you can work out which part of that I subscribe to.

People should really stop trying to apply reality where reality shouldn’t be applied. It’s Christmas after all and numerous kooks are trying to find some astronomical explanation for the star of Bethlehem as told in the Nativity story.

There is none. There can be none. The story doesn’t even make sense.

As told in the Bible, and I’ll quote “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.”

They saw a star in the east, but they are from the east, so they went east. If you’re to the east of Jerusalem and you walk east, you go away from Jerusalem. A star in the east would have led the three astrologers to the east, which would take them away from Jerusalem. So what are they doing there?

It’s self contradictory, it doesn’t make sense and trying to apply reality to fiction will result in failure.

The King James Bible, from which I took that quote, is translated from Greek, which was in turn translated from Hebrew. The Greek word used is “aster” which literally means “star” but not as we consider a star. Aster could have described the moon, a planet, a comet or a star. Simply put, “aster” was anything in the sky at night. The Greeks knew about comets and had a specific term for them. Also they named the planets and the Moon. The Arabs also did, and were the time’s most prolific and accurate astronomers; Most stars have Arabic names as testament to their meticulous cataloging. The Greeks were also somewhat interested in “new stars”, as they called transient phenomena that weren’t comets. We also have the Chinese who were notorious for recording any celestial phenomenon, they have records of Comet Halley well into antiquity, three supernovae, several novae and records of other comets so accurate that orbits can be determined from them. The ancients were certainly interested in what went on over their heads, they didn’t know what they were as we do, but they sure recorded them. Where are those records for this particular star?

The Arabs and Chinese had nothing to say about some magnificent star suddenly appearing. Yes, the Arabs, who the Hebrews were did not record anything out of the ordinary. The American natives make no record. The Chinese don’t. Neither do the Indians or the Japanese or the Europeans… The likelyhood of a bright star that had no right to be there being missed by everyone on Earth except three astrologers is somewhat remote.

An additional problem is that stars and indeed anything else in the night sky will move over the course of a night. A star in the east at sunset would be in the south at midnight and in the west at sunrise. Following it would lead one in a circle.

If you’re a religious type, you shouldn’t need an explanation. If you’re not, why would you be trying to explain a fictitious account anyway? Exactly who are these people pandering to?

According to UPI the Ministry of Defence is preparing to release many previously secret files on UFO reports. No doubt “Ufologists” will have their pants in a twist over this, but let’s read this whole thing.

 5% of sightnings go unexplained, which is a tremendously low rate. We have to include black projects (e.g. military aircraft which are still classified), witness error, reports too confused to explain, and so forth. Such a low rate of ‘background noise’ shows how seriously the MoD took the phenomenon as perhaps a Soviet threat at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, the USAF’s Project Blue Book was established to determine whether advanced Soviet craft were behind the UFO craze.

 Witnesses are notoriously unreliable, I remember being on a road trip and Venus was low on the horizon. Of course I recognised it, but my brother didn’t. Later on, he said to me “Did you see that huge glowing thing that was following us?” - Venus is neither huge nor glowing, but it was blazingly bright. People confuse brightness for size in their memories, he swore blind that he saw a glowing orb.

It’ll be interesting to see, if only to see just how stupid people are, what lies within the reports.

Sometimes, I think this country couldn’t be much more anti-science but then I look over the Atlantic and see how anti-science the Americans are, to the point where education boards contemplate the teaching of anti-science in schools.

That doesn’t make stuff like this any more palatable though. In brief, the Government has lately been noisy and full of hot air about its support for science and especially students. Then it goes and cuts many science grants by a quarter and pulls out of some of the most prestigious and advanced research in the world. In summary, the UK (the  Science and Technology Facilities Council is responsible for the expenditure of government science funding and this is their decision) is pulling out of the Gemini North and Gemini South telescopes, the Canary Islands Isaac Newton Group (Wikipedia link) and the International Linear Collider as well as a whole host of other projects and sites.

When we hear rhetoric from the government saying we’re falling behind in our commitment to physical sciences and we need more students to enroll in physical sciences for the good of our industry, then see the government slash its investment in just that area, you have to wonder if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

Of course, we can still afford to spend more than anyone else in Europe and Asia on our military.

It’s all over the web.

Scientists, especially in the field of climate change, are a conservative bunch. They put in the most favourable, the least changing data and work from that, it’s part of the scientific method’s defences against sensationalism. However, sometimes it means that results are too conservative.

As it is with climate modelling. Supercomputers or even your computer are put to task to model how the future climate will play out given the climate records of history. When put on the weather records of the 19th century, for example, they can successfully predict the weather records of the 20th century, even if the computer was given no knowledge of them.

Just last year a team of respected scientists predicted that the summer Arctic would be ice-free by 2040, but they’d grossly overestimated how much ice was actually there. Mapping the extent of ice is easy, but mapping its volume is not and they’d hugely underestimated the actual volume of ice. (To make this simpler, they’d overestimated the ice area but underestimated the ice depth)

Now, a new study from Maslowsky et. al. from the Naval Postgraduate School in California, USA, have used the most accurate and up to date data yet and arrived at a shocking conclusion; There will be no ice over the arctic at all in just five to six years. They used data from 1979 to 2004, even ignoring 2005 and 2007, where more ice was lost in the summer than ever before. If anything, their estimate is already too timid.

Maslowski is, however, known for undercutting the dates of most other researchers but never by this much. He contends that other models had overestimated the volume of ice and also underestimated the heat delivered by ocean currents and convection. He points out that ice loss from 2000 to 2004 was far in excess of the current models but his model predicted them most accurately.

The BBC also sought comment from Professor Wadhams of Cambridge University, who uses data from Royal Navy submarines to measure arctic ice. Wadhams believes that older climate models have not been using actual reality as enough of a guide. His data shows that the arctic ice is thinning faster than it is shrinking and that ice reflects heat back into space, so a loss of ice causes greater loss of ice.

The last word remains to be said and, like all science, Maslowsky’s work will need to be confirmed and scrutinised by independent researchers who are most likely already hard at work. If he’s right, however, the polar bear will be extinct in the wild by 2015.

It’s no secret that the government trying to grant itself more power than it should have and such is the sheer perverseness of holding someone without charge for so long (42 days!) that MPs are quite rightly laughing it out of parliament.

The government wants to be seen as “tough on terror” but they forget that Britain has a long memory. What worked against a far more determined and well funded group (the IRA) won’t work against a ragtag bunch of extremists? Where were these wonderful new laws then? That’s right, as unnecessary as they are now.

The tactic is simple, first the government hugely expands the definition of “terrorism” to include a 23 year old woman who wrote bad poetry, some kid who was just trying to be clever on the Internet. Then it expands what it can do with those people to the point of absurdity, Blair suffered his only Commons defeat when trying to extend the detainment limit to 90 days. Can you imagine being detained without charge and without access to a lawyer for 90 days? It’s something the Americans would (and do) do in quasi-legal internment camps and has utterly no place in any society that dare call itself free and civilised.

The latest development is a laughable attempt at an ineffective “safeguard” to the extended detention plan, by forcing Parliament to approve each and every use of the proposals. Quite rightly, MPs see through the charade for what it is, mere rhetoric intended to get the proposal more support in the House which would have little to no practical value as law or as any form of safeguard and also bring the shadow of Parliament deep into the judicial process.

If someone wants to blow shit up badly enough, chances are they will, the IRA proved that. What we absolutely cannot and must not do is blindly lead ourselves to the yoke of oppression on the misguided path of security. The Government would have us cut our own heads off in a blind panic, just to be sure that the “terrorists” couldn’t do it instead. We should not scuttle our own ship.

Terrified reactionists who just so happen to be running the damned country are widely being reported to have suffered a bloody nose at the Old Bailey as jail wasn’t sentenced but nothing could be further from the truth.

In truth, a young Muslim woman and a contributing tax-paying member of society was arrested, tried and convicted of terrorism for nothing more than a few bad poems she posted online and owning “of owning terrorist pamphlets, including The Al-Qaeda Manual” according to the BBC. Why do we not see similar arrests made for owning copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the various works of Lenin or works that have caused more conflict throughout history than any others, the Holy Bible and the Q’ran? Exactly what kind of society forbids mere information, speech, if the Government doesn’t approve of it? The same kind of society the Islamic extremists want to turn the world into. Our most valued liberty, that of free speech, has not been taken from us by evil bearded turban-wearing terrorists, but by Whitehall and the traitors to Britain in Government.

Those extremists probably don’t realise that they’ve successfully convinced the West to use its left hand to chop off its right hand. In the name of defending our “freedom”, we’re surrendering it instead. We’re not fighting a threat to freedom, we are that threat.

I’ve been threatening it for a while, but I finally thought I’d get my blog online before Kami’s. Work will progress on a non-sucky site design, which will be my first new design since I re-did Runesource way back.