Hattix

It’s the same old story. “It’s easier nowadays than it was when I was at school” usually accompanied by some slanted study or other. The latest is one from the Royal Society of Chemistry and as my degree was in chemistry, I decided to take a look.

According to the RSC, students of today can’t pass an exam from the 1960s, performing progressively worse on older exam questions. They then say it’s because modern exams are easier. I’m sorry guys, but the facts do not support such a conclusion. Teaching standards have evolved since the 1960s and so have the methods of examination. Nowadays far more is learned in the same time and the stakes are much higher. I passed my GCSEs in 1997, my A-levels in 1999, hardly recent but not ancient either. Some of the topics I did in the first year of my Physics A-Level are now being taught in high schools, my brother is doing his GCSEs this year and we’re having some quite interesting conversations about what he’s learning.

In this study many of the techniques and principles examined, in the 1960s, just aren’t taught today because they’re irrelevant. They’ve either been replaced or found to be not an effective teaching example. For example, in GCSE science we did parts on catalysts and molecular structures in the mid-1990s. Back in the 1960s, it would have been more focused on laboratory equipment and the correct use of it; How much science does that teach someone? Very little. Sure a laboratory chemist needs to know his tools, but he needs to know his craft more importantly. In the 1960s, students would be taught how to perform example reactions, but not why they were doing it or even what the reactants were or how they reacted. Today the focus is much more on the how and why and much less on mundane equipment. Does knowing how to operate a bunsen burner make one a good scientist? Of course not! This equipment fetish we had back in the 1960s was a waste of classroom time, it taught students nothing about science but it was on the exam papers.

Mathematics is the same and another good example. In the 1960s, log tables were a common sight in classrooms, as were things like slide-rules and trigonometric tables. Part of the course had to go into how to use them. Nowadays we have calculators built into our mobile phones even, such primitive tools are unnecessary and so they are not taught. A modern student asked how to look up from a cosine table is quite rightly going to be baffled, does this make him worse at mathematics - Of course not, he knows how to do it on his calculator and much faster with much more accuracy. I’d bet a student in the 1960s, asked to program a modern calculator to solve a quadratic function would be just as baffled and that DOES make him worse at mathematics because with tables being nowhere to be seen, he cannot solve problems which he’d have relied on them for.

The next time someone pops up to attack our students with flawed studies and “back in my day” bullshit, put them in their place. That place normally being a nursing home.

You’ve got to hand it to the Germans. They’re as obsessed with amorphous shaped meat as we are with pies. Hamburgers, bratwurst, brockwurst, frankfurter and virtually all sausages ultimately derive from Germany (and before that from mutton patties that the Mongols made). Eating a few hotdogs, I started to wonder what meat it actually was (rather like how a vegan wonders which chemical in soy will give them cancer out of the 100+ recognised carcinogens in it) and imagine my surprise when I found it was 55% chicken!

From the label on the tin: Chicken (Mechanically recovered) (55%), Water, Pork Fat, Pork Collagen, Salt, Wheat Flour, Chicken Fat, Thickeners (E412, E451), Beef Collagen, Herbs and Spices (Contains celery), Flavouring (contains Milk Lactose, Soya, Egg), Natural Smoke Flavour, Preservative (E250)

The use of mechanically recovered meat in sausages is widespread - It’s what’s scraped off bones when they’re fed through a wire mesh after proper cuts of meat have been taken and quite suited for making sausages and burgers. I was just surprised as to how little pork it had in it, indeed the only pork is fat and gristle (collagen). There’s a little chicken fat and beef collagen in there too.

Of the “E-numbers” (which, I will add, are a wonderful way to standardise nomenclature), we start with E412 and E451, which are guaran and triphosphate. Guaran is an extract of the guar bean and around eight times better at thickening than cornstarch. Triphosphate is actually an emulsifier. Essentially this keeps the water content of the hotdog at the proper texture, thickness and stops it from leaking out. The preservative is E250, sodium nitrite. It inhibits fungal and bacterial growth and means the hotdogs do not have to be refrigerated and do not spoil in transit. It is very difficult to find any meat, especially pre-cooked, which doesn’t contain sodium or potassium nitrite. Why’s that then?

Poultry products, especially in mixed-meat servings, are vectors of three very nasty pathogens - listeria, botulism and salmonella. Salmonella especially is widespread, it’s as harmless to chickens as E. coli is to mammals (there are more E. coli cells in your body than human cells) but can cause deadly infections in mammals, especially humans. All three can grow under refrigeration (listeria can even grow when the meat is frozen!) but none of them grow well at all if nitrite is present. Indeed some countries do not permit the selling of prepackaged precooked meat which has not been nitrite treated. In the UK the pressure is more litigous - Wash the meat with sodium nitrite solution or risk extremely expensive legal action when people contract listeria? Here’s an interestingly amusing activist website which is about as grounded in reality as most vegan militants are.

Hotdogs, of course, are precooked and are quite defined by it. This means that the fat content of them is melted and spread out, the nitrites largely oxidised to nitrates and nitrosamines (the latter is carcinogenic, but only in very large quantities and you still shouldn’t include it in products for babies) and the colour which is added by the flavouring and pork collagen is leeched into the chicken.

Interesting facts about hotdogs (the sausage, also known as the frankfurter)

• In the US, they can contain no more than 20% mechanically recovered beef or pork, so everyone uses chicken.
• Sometimes known as “wieners”, this comes from the German name for Vienna, Wien which has its own variety of sausage mostly made of pork
• They contain high amounts of calcium as a result of being mechanically recovered
• As a sausage, the frankfurter has been around since the fifteenth century
• The name comes from “dachshund” (little dog), the first commercial sausage-sandwich of success were sold as “dachshund sausages” after their shape
• In the early 20th century they were called just “dogs” until they became associated with baseball in the US where, on cold days, vendors would advertise “hot dogs”
• Hot dog purists (yes, they exist) consider adding ketchup to be blasphemy since the strongly spiced and flavoured ketchup completely overpowers the subtly smoked sausage
• Adding English mustard to hot dogs sold in London was a common offering in the 1970s with more than a little humour. American tourists had no idea of the strength of English mustard as opposed to the more bland taste of their French mustard.
• There’s no standard recipe for hot dogs in terms of chicken, turkey, pork or beef content

There’s more nitty-gritty about how these kinds of meats are prepared in this post.

Give the government, regardless of what country you are, a power and the government will abuse its intent.

After the global financial crisis took down a few Icelandic banks, the UK government used anti-terror legislation to freeze their assets in the UK which further hastened their demise. They didn’t use an actual “terrorist” part of the law, but the part they used would never have got through commons if it wasn’t piggy backed on a knee-jerk bill. Where’s the connection between financial screw ups and bombs in streets? There isn’t one.

The US recently removed North Korea from “state sponsors of terrorism” because they agreed to a nuclear disarmament deal. Where’s the connection between nuclear disarmament and militia with AK-47s? There isn’t one.

If we give the government a power, they will use it. They do not care why or how. The “spirit” of the law is irrelevant, only its letter. The failure we make is that politicians sell their laws on that spirit, on the “it will save us from the jihadists” and don’t tell us when they use it for entirely different reasons. We didn’t give them these powers to abuse like this, to extort trade concessions.

In Britain, suicide is perfectly legal but assisting it is not, it’s prosecutable as murder or manslaughter (but almost always manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, carrying a maximum sentence of fourteen years) and it seems once every few years some terminally ill person gets it in their mind to challenge the law.

The last time this happened in Britain was two years ago and the House of Lords shot down the bill, Christians and Muslims (Lord Ahmed quoted the Koran “Do not kill yourselves. For verily God Almighty has been most merciful to you”) voting it down on faith grounds. You should all know my opinion of faith in politics. Our politicians are there to give their own insights, to apply the law and the principles of the land in a fair, neutral and unbiased manner. What the hell do they think they’re doing quoting whatever religion they think’s best? We want their thoughts, not the words on some dusty old tome written thousands of years ago by some uneducated cultist. I can’t think of a phrase suiting better than sheer professional incompetence. Values change in as much as fifty years (how many segregated washrooms do you see in even somewhere as intolerant as America these days?) imagine what they do in thousands.

Catherine Bennett is the latest (there, I linked to The Guardian, does that make me a spineless liberal puppet yet?) to become the mouthpiece for the assisted suicide movement, but I think she’s firing off base. She wants the right to get help in ending her life when she feels like it, but it’s the nature of that help which disturbs me. She’s not talking about the opinion of qualified medical professionals, but her husband. I can’t support anything like that! It’s just so incredibly open to abuse.

That’s where the line is drawn between “assisted suicide” and “euthanasia”. The first one is basically “murder with permission”, the second has medical grounding and requires medical advice and approval. The second is what we need to clarify, to make it clear that (with the go-ahead of a competent physician) someone incapable of ending their own life can get the help they need to end their suffering. In this we currently treat dogs more humanely than we do our fellow people.

Piracy is killing the artists, right? RIGHT?

From figures here

It’s like a lingering bad smell that won’t go away. A tiny number of entirely uneducated people believe (and yes, this is faith, not reason) that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth! It’s turned on full power on Wednesday (though experiments don’t begin in full until next spring) and, the gibbering lunacy goes, might produce black holes that do not obey the laws of physics. I kid you not.

It physically cannot happen. Its not even improbable, it’s impossible.

Cosmic rays pound particles in the upper atmosphere with incredible amounts of energy, far higher than the LHC will ever go. Earth’s still here. Even if microscopic black holes are created, they’re no threat at all. Black holes evaporate through Hawking Radiation (Named for Stephen Hawking, who first theorised and quantified it) but the amount of Hawking Radiation emitted is proportional to the volume of a black hole, not its mass. The volume increases very, very slowly as mass increases so really massive black holes, like those in the cores of galaxies, would take many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe to evaporate. On the opposite end of the scale, a black hole the size of a grapefruit would be gone in just a few hours. Black holes the size of subatomic particles will be gone in nanoseconds.

So even if those cosmic rays in the high atmosphere do produce micro-scale black holes, they’re gone very rapidly. The energy domain of the LHC may be sufficient to form a micro-scale black hole (though it’s very unlikely) but it’ll be even smaller than the hypothetical ones made in the upper atmosphere, so evaporate even more rapidly.

There’s another twisted tale about strangelets (clumps of strange matter). Strangelets are bits of matter composed of up, down and strange quarks, normal nuclei are just composed of up and down quarks. One theory goes that strange matter is more stable than normal matter and so when a strange quark encounters a nucleus, it converts the protons and neutrons to strange matter and more strange quarks, setting in effect a chain reaction which would consume all matter in the universe. Again, natural processes are far more energetic than the LHC and they haven’t destroyed the universe for at least the last fourteen billion years.

However the laws of physics aren’t enough to prevent lunacy. Go read that link a moment. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. This is partly our problem. We haven’t done enough outreach, haven’t done enough education to ensure that these kinds of wild misconceptions aren’t made to begin with. Science as a whole needs to be more accessible, more interesting and more engaging so that even the “man on the street” won’t fall for this kind of sick stunt.

It’s not often that I agree with a Christian on religious topics.

Though I’ve got to poke a few holes in the BBC’s “we don’t want to offend anyone” piece.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, John Packer, said that apart from the government, the Church of England was the biggest provider of social services at home.

That’s rather like saying “Apart from my car, my legs were the biggest provider of transport between Edinburgh and London.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown told them that millions of people owed the Anglican Communion a debt of gratitude for upholding the cause of the poor.

Through lavish archbishops sampling fine caviar in ceremonial robes. That’s some fine cause you’re upholding there.

Tutu goes on to rightly equate the West’s favourite scapegoat, ‘terrorism’ with poverty, though he stops short of identifying it as a political fear-factor.

Archbishop Tutu accused some of his fellow Anglicans of going against the teaching of Jesus in their treatment of homosexual people by “persecuting the already persecuted”.
Tutu [...] said traditionalists were wrong to suggest that gay people had chosen homosexuality and the dispute had to be kept in proportion.

Spreading hate is not against the teaching of Jesus. It is the teaching of Jesus if the Christians for the last one and half thousand years are to be believed.

Others, including Bishop John Packer, insist that the Church must have a sexual ethic - a sense of what is right and wrong in sexual behaviour.

Are these people stupid? They observe governments steadily losing power over the bedroom as society stands up and says “enough, we’ll do as we please out of prying eyes” and they want to get into a shrinking niché? Have they no idea as to why it’s shrinking? We’re fed up of oppression and unethical “morality”.

We demand ethics with our morality and the Christians can’t deliver. Time after time, sect after sect, all Christians have proven to be the enemy of ethics. They have no concept of “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “bad”, only a concept of “we’re right, you’re not”. Let them engineer their own demise. It saves everyone else the effort.

Been a while since I covered some nice hard science in the blog, so here’s some. Caution: May contain traces of Special Relativity, including but not limited to lightcones and worldlines.

The usual uneducated answer is just “Oh that’s just hubris. We’ll learn some new physics that let it happen. It’s just a breakthrough away” so I’m about to show why it can’t happen, no matter what breakthroughs may be made.

For simplicity, we’ll use a hypothetical superluminal signal. It could be anything from a radio transmission to a rocket. We have Earth and a distance spacecraft and we communicate that signal. According to controllers on Earth, the signal is obviously received after it was sent. Our spacecraft is going very fast, however, so is undergoing time dialation. The spacecraft then sends the same signal back, using the same superluminal method, to acknowledge that it arrived correctly.

That all seems well and good, right? It isn’t, we get a VERY big problem. Let’s work out why.

We cannot influence (in any way at all) anything that’s, say, a light year away for at least another year. Nothing we can do can propogate faster than light, but our signal above can. We’ll do this visually.

Let’s plot space against time with our trusty MSPaint.

In our example, Earth is at the origin. We send a message faster than light to our spaceship. As we have both axes as the same unit (spacetime), then a photon’s path would be at 45 degrees from bottom left to top right. Going faster than light, our signal gets there before the photon does, so has a gradient below one. The photon would arrive later. The next diagram shows a photon and our signal getting to the spaceship’s location in space. First, however, we need to plot space and time on the same graph for the spaceship - As it’s moving, it’ll be tilted relative to the one for Earth, this means we have to transform the axes a little bit. Black is Earth, blue is the spaceship. Yellow is a beam of light, the thin black is when Earth sees it arrive at the spaceship, the thin blue is it the spaceship seeing it arrive at itself. You’ll notice these lines are parallel in space and time to the major axes of both observers - This is simultaneity at work, if we had only one axis (as above) then the lines would be vertical and horizontal but being parallel is what counts.

So let’s get on with it and send a signal faster than light already. It’ll be yellow again. Note that we have to draw the line below the blue axis for space for the spaceship. If we didn’t, then it wouldn’t actually be faster than light, we could just shift the axes of course.

The signal is yellow, going faster than light, so it’s going along the space axis more per unit of time than the light would, or going through time less per unit of space than the light would. As far as Earth is concerned, it arrived at the spaceship in the future (the black time marker is positive, it’s in the future) but look where it is for the spaceship. The blue line of simultaniety for the spaceship is in the past, but this has no meaning as the spaceship doesn’t know when it was sent.

What happens when the roles are reversed and the spaceship echoes the message back? The reply arrives back at Earth before the original signal was sent from Earth! Effect has just come before cause. If that signal was a messenger, then that messenger would arrive home before he left, which just doesn’t make any sense.

That, hopefully not too scary, is why we’ll never be able to go faster than light.

Colloquially it’s a saying about sausages and law: Those who like it shouldn’t know how it’s made. It applies to a lot more foods too. This post is going to talk about mechanically recovered meat and meat reforming.

Nutritionally it’s near identical to any standard cut of meat, so there’s no health issue to worry about over what would be normal. What’s more fun is how it’s made and what it is.

We all have exposure to MRM and reformed meat, it’s what makes up those pre-sliced ham packets you can get anywhere. Mechanical recovery and reformation are two different processes and need not occur together (but MRM is almost always reformed, while reformed meat is not always MRM).

The particular example I’m using is a pack of ham slices I have here - “Thinly Sliced Ham”:
Pork (78%), Water, Salt, Dextrose, Stabilisers (E451, E450), Antioxidant (E301), Preservatives (E252, E250).

To the untrained eye, it looked as though it was just a slice through a block of ham. It’s not. It’s never been. After butchering and carving, a carcass typically has quite a bit of red meat (by ‘meat’ I’m refering to muscle, not offal or other forms of meat, but actual red meat which would otherwise be called ‘pork’) left on it. Some clings to the bones, other chunks are unattractive due to size or position. This is removed by forcing the bones through a mesh of fine metal wires. The result is cartilage, some meat and a few chips of bone. That’s mechanical recovery.

These slivers of meat are partly digested by the addition of enzymes to make them sticky, then forced into a block, which is reforming. The origin is usually quite a few animals from multiple sources. The block is forced together in a compression chamber where square blocks of sticky meat come out one side and a vaguely pink/white slurry sloshes in the other side. Tasty.

They then cure it and steam it before slicing and packaging.

78% pork, though? Most of the other 22% is water. A very light brine is added for three reasons. Firstly because reformed meat is very dry and would stick together in the pack and secondly because people consider meat that’s cold and wet to be fresher than meat that’s cold and dry. Finally and greatest of all is that it bulks out the meat. Sold by weight and 22% of the weight is water.

The salt added is part of the water and usually quite light as far as brine goes. The salt is added for very simple reasons: The reforming process removes salt from the pork which is naturally quite salty and salt is a preservative.

Dextrose is very simply, sugar. Or, rather, glucose, the most basic sugar. “Glucose” itself refers to D-glucose, it is a chiral compound with four chiral centers (centers with reflective symmetry but no superimposition symmetry or rotational symmetry - they make differently structured molecules) in the molecule, giving 16 enantiomers. Eight of them are biologically inactive in that they don’t taste sweet, they provide no energy to the body but are otherwise chemically identical, these are L-glucose and very hard to come by since no biological processes make them. Dextrose always refers to D-glucose. It’s added for taste.

E451 is sodium tripolyphosphate and potassium tripolyphosphate (Na₅P₃O₁₀ and K₅P₃O₁₀) which are used as emulsifiers, preservatives, acidity regulators but overwhelmingly (and especially here) as hydrolysers or emulsifiers - They make food retain water. It adds a rather soapy taste so is used sparingly. Used here it is an emulsifier, but it’s also used in detergents (it softens hard water), toothpaste and industry. While not toxic or harmful in any testing, most juristictions limit how much tripolyphosphate can be added because of its bulking properties, it makes protein-based food (meat, seafood, etc.) take on water so make them heavier. When buying by weight, this adds to the sale price but not to the production cost. In our 22% water ham, it’s there to keep the water in the ham.

E450 is similar to E451, but is E450(i) Disodium diphosphate, E450 (ii) Trisodium diphosphate, E450 (iii) Tetrasodium pyrophosphate, E450 (v) Tetrapotassium pyrophosphate, E450 (vi) Calcium dihydrogen diphosphate. These are a group of diphosphates. For some of them the older “pyrophosphate” name is more common, but they are all actually diphosphate. Diphosphate is extremely important in biology as it is part of the respiration process whereby sugars and fats are metabolised to energy. As a pure chemical, it is slightly toxic and mildly irritant and can cause an allergic reaction to sensitive people when used in food. In food it is used as a buffering agent (resists changes in acidity), an emulsifier as E451 is and as a thickening agent. Here it is an emulsifier…why two? E451 can be quite unpleasantly tasting but E450 is tasteless. It’s added in much larger quantities to soy-based meat ‘alternatives’ which aren’t terribly healthy to begin with.

E301 is the sodium salt of ascorbic acid, vitamin C. It’s used here as an antioxidant, specifically to prevent the formation of nitrosamines from nitrites via contact with oxygen.

E252 is potassium nitrate or saltpetre/saltpeter. It is used as an explosive, a fertiliser and a food additive and has been used for curing meat for hundreds of years. Traditional foods have used potassium nitrate to preserve meat long before the chemical was even known about, usually as ashes from burnt wood.

E250 is why E301 is present, sodium or potassium nitrite. They are antibacterial and antifungal compounds used largely to prevent the occurence of clostridium botulinum (botulism). Nitrites oxidise to nitrosamines which are listed as being potentially carcinogenic, but unproven. Nitrosamines are formed from nitrites and some amino acids (e.g. vitamins, proteins) under high temperatures (frying), acidic environments (e.g. your stomach) and in the presence of oxygen (e.g. in air). Since we can’t get amino acids, the “building blocks” of life, any way other than by eating them then nitrosamines are produced by the body during digestion, mostly from meat. Some studies have linked them to cancers of the gastric tract and oesophagus but at a very low risk. The conversion rate from nitrites isn’t great in the stomach (not hot enough) so risk is very low if anything.

Faith schools. A homogenous environment within which outsiders (the rest of us) are unknown and feared. We naturally fear what we don’t know and a child in a faith school fears those of other faiths or of no faith. They are schools in which science which contradicts whatever ancient book or soggy text has scribbled on it can simply be ignored. They are schools where reality is suspended and pupils are taught a religious fantasy. Your child who worked his balls off to learn real science and real mathematics can lose out on a college or university place to some kid who wrote “my god did it”.

Our Government PAYS FOR this horrendous breach of British and human values.

This must end. Of course these schools will only employ teachers of the “correct faith”. It’s racial segregation applied to the most vulnerable among us, our children. I’ve already covered in this very blog how our government doesn’t give a damned shit about REALLY protecting our children.

No state funding is acceptable for any school with ANY form of discrimination based on whichever ghost in the sky (presumably dodging planes) is biggest. Religious schools are an evil establishment aiming to indoctrinate the most vulnerable. It cannot be allowed to continue in this day and age.