Hattix

I was wondering two things at half past two (about twenty minutes ago as I write this, about one hour and ten minutes ago as I post it) this morning. What to eat and what to post. So I decided to combine the two.

My victim was a packet of Batchelors Beef flavour Savoury Rice. As I was making it, I was wondering about all the so-called “food scares” we have every so often when the media gets bored. My idea was to list out every ingredient listed on the packet and see what, exactly, they are.

As printed:
Rice, Dried Peas (4%), Flavourings (contain Celery, Milk, Soya), Dried Carrot (2.5%), Dried Onion, Salt, Sugar, Dried Red Pepper (1%), Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Flavour Enhancers (E621, E635, E627), Onion Powder, Colour (Ammonia Caramel (contains Wheat)), Garlic Powder, Black Pepper Extract and Herb Extract.

Rice, dried peas, celery and milk are obvious. The first one worth mentioning is soya. This is a derivative of soy which is a veritable cocktail of poison! Our Western obsession with soy is obvious: It’s cheap, available in huge quantities and very easy to produce. Soy and its products contain enzyme inhibitors which block protein digestion by blocking the enzymes responsible for breaking down proteins into amino acids (the ‘building material’ of most body tissue). We have haemagluttin which causes blood clots, hinders oxygen transport in the blood and stunts growth. Soy contains numerous phytates which make minerals unavailable to the body during digestion, remarkably insidious since the best way to avoid severe mineral deficiency with phytates and phytic acid around is to eat lots of meat. Last, but by far not least, phytoestrogens, chemicals which mimic the female sex hormone. Soy, in any of its forms, is bad news. It has been linked to Asians (especially Chinese) having far higher rates of cancer along the digestive tract than anyone else in the world and with the relatively recent rise in the same cancers among Westerners. Soy-based infant formula is banned in many countries and linked to numerous growth defects, especially in girls (probably due to the phytoestrogens). Dr. Fitzpatrick’s ‘Truth About Soy’ website has more information.

Next up we have dried carrot and dried onion. Carrot, when dried, is virtually tasteless and is used for colour and texture. Onion when dried becomes quite a potent spice, so is used for flavouring.

Salt needs no introduction, it’s an essential mineral with a distinctive taste. It also helps food cook better. Sugar is just for taste and is a dimer of fructose and glucose in its most common form, sucrose. Note that “salts” in a chemical context is not what we usually think of as salt. A salt is the product made when an acid is neutralised. Sodium salts are common in food because sodium is only harmful in huge excess (and is actually necessary for life) and the alternative is using the acid directly (e.g. monosodium glutamate instead of glutamic acid) which is typically not possible since the acid would be in liquid form, the salt in solid.

Dried red peppers are common in this sort of thing, being largely for colour, but also quite a potent spice in their own right.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil is the next big one. Oils are long chain carbon molecules (long chain organics) with various chemical groups. The ones we’re interested in are double bonds (the alkene group) between two carbon atoms. As the molecule cannot rotate around that bond, it’s fixed into shape. This prevents it from getting up close with other molecules, so lowers the melting point. What we do is then react them in a huge reaction vessel with hydrogen and a catalyst, typically nickel, to crack open the double bond into a single bond by adding hydrogen across it. This means the molecule is more free to rotate and can stack well with its fellow molecules, if it can get closer to another molecule, it can solidify more easily (London dispersion forces are stronger) and so the melting point rises: Perfect when you want something closer to the consistency of butter and less like, well, vegetable oil. Now, the big problem there is that we get an amount of some quite nasty stuff in there: Trans-fats. Trans-fats aren’t found in nature and the body’s digestive system doesn’t recognise them as something it can use to make your belly bigger. They’re being more and more linked to all kinds of chronic illnesses and some places have already banned their use while others are considering it.

The flavourings are next, E621, E635 and E627. If anything, european standards mean that manufacturers have to be consistent in their labelling. Starting with E621, we have monosodium glutamate, the sodium salt of glutamic acid, a natural amino acid. The sodium is, of course, removed and the amino acid restored. It has a distinctive taste but was with a health scare some years ago. Even now, some manufacturers advertise “MSG-Free!” as though it were a good thing. MSG is found in nature and quite plentiful (especially in Asian foodstuffs), it is present in high quantities in yeast, soy and many spices. The health scare? Investigation after investigation found utterly no evidence to support any harmful activity by glutamate or glutamic acid, noted its high natural presence and that the human body produces it itself and that amounts which could cause harm in laboratory tests (on rats) were massively high doses involving chemically pure MSG. The verdict? Enjoy the stuff, it tastes nice and indeed the taste itself, umami, is very difficult to obtain any other way because our tongues contain specific receptors for glutamate - It’s something that we’ve evolved to be able to detect and almost everyone finds the taste to be pleasant. Nature wants us to eat this stuff.

E635 refer to guanylic and inosinic acid or their sodium salts in mixed proportions. They’re used as flavour enhancers. They don’t have a flavour themselves but enhance many others, meaning less salt (salt being common salt, sodium chloride) and flavourings are needed. Finally, E627 is guanylic acid alone and used exactly as E635 is (it’s partly the same chemical!) as a flavour enhancer.

That brings us to onion powder, made by pulverising dried onions. It is a very potent flavour but otherwise unremarkable.

Under that is our colour, ammonia caramel, also known as E150c, baker’s caramel or beer caramel. Caramel has no known toxicity and, as an extensively used ingredient, has undergone exhaustive trials and study. It is used as a colour in this case, to stain the rice slightly brown (this is a “beef-flavour” after all).

Finally, we have garlic powder (another very powerful flavouring), black pepper extract (usually simply crushed in water, the dissolvable stuff dissolved, then dried out of the water and added to the food) and herb extract which isn’t specified; This means it legally doesn’t have to be so no known studies have found any cause for concern.

And there we have it. The extensive list of ingredients which make a common modern convenience food everything it is. Flavourings to emulate beef (which typically fail), flavour enhancers to make the taste stronger, vegetables and spices to add texture and colour, a colouring, a bunch of cheap soy and the ever-present hydrogenated vegetable oil, possibly to prevent the rice from clumping.

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?

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.

…He’s probably trying to decieve you. Cardinal O’ Brien, Roman Catholic Archbishop in Scotland speaks of “Frankenstein” experiments and “hideous practices” over the Government’s hybrid embryo bill, seeking to provide a legal framework for research to go ahead. It’s quite easy, and Christians are long known for taking the easy way out, to instantly assume these mad scientists in their darkened labs making nightmarish abominations behind closed doors. Take it away, Mr. O’ Brien:

“He is promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.”

This is the deception the Christian agenda wants you to believe. It isn’t just deception, it’s bare-faced lies. They think you’re stupid.

The facts of the case, unfortunately for them, are rather simple even for the layman to understand. Scientists need a specific type of cell called a stem cell for research into cures and treatments for horrible diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, they also provide insights into cancer and numerous other ailments. Unfortunately for us, these medical researchers are limited in their supply of stem cells; Stem cells come from human embryos before they’ve actually become a foetus and are still just a mess of cells chugging away with no life of their own. This has drawn ethical fire in the past but has generally been allowed to proceed.

What the scientists want to do is create their own embryos, free from the ethical ground of having to destroy what could (but never would have) become a human foetus. They do this by taking an animal egg cell, any mammal will do, and inserting the nucleus from a human cell, perhaps a skin cell. The resulting cell is a human egg cell, but created from an animal egg cell wrapping. It’s no more a human-animal hybrid than someone wearing a wooly jumper is a hybrid of human and sheep.

This is the entire truth. The animal cell provides the ‘cell machinery’ (the wooly jumper) while the human nucleus provides the instructions of what to do and gives the cell its identity. This cell will then proceed to develop as any other egg cell would and produce stem cells which the researchers can then harvest and use to progress in their understanding of various horrible diseases. These cells would never be brought “to term” or implanted in a mother. Even if they were, it would essentially be human cloning (which is banned) and the resulting child would be entirely human, not some deformed monstrosity. Scientists have no interest in cloning humans, they just want the pre-embryonic stem cells.

It is this research into Parkinson’s Disease, into Alzheimers Disease, into cancer that the Christians hate so much. If people aren’t dying and suffering, why would they turn to their God?

It brings me no joy at all and a great deal of sadness to learn that Arthur C. Clarke, the most noted science fiction author since Asimov, passed away yesterday. Born in 1917, his highest moment of fame was writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but his legacy is much, much greater than a few literary works.

Clarke first described the geosynchronous orbit[1], where weather and communications satellites exist today. He wrote numerous factual books (including the very popular Snows of Olympus) and, indeed, most of his fiction did not stray outside the bounds of science. He had no warp engines, no teleporters, no ultra beam weapons, just physics and astronomy. He inspired two generations of rocket scientists, aerospace engineers, astronomers and physicists.

He was not just an author. He was an acclaimed futurist and inventor and a very influential one. The Apollo 13 Lunar Module was named “Odyssey” after his best known work, he is often quoted saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and is acknowledged as a major influence to Gene Roddenberry’s creation of Star Trek.

His tales of lunar colonisation and journeys through space never once cross the boundaries to fantasy but remain, to this day, engaging, realistic and very well written.

Spend a few minutes on Google exploring this giant of a man and the legacy he leaves. For a personal story, check Phil’s obituary at his Bad Astronomy Blog.

[1] While the idea was being tossed around Bell Labs also, Clarke described and notarised it so well that his writing was used to demonstrate prior art and deny a patent application.

I felt it. Up late, room lit by a small four-watt flourescent tube and the slightly more powerful TFT monitor when a few tremors rolled me in my seat a little. I knew what it was instantly, I felt the Dudley quake of 2002 and it was exactly the same. The gentle rolling lasted maybe five seconds before a rapid series of sharp jolts took over; That’s when I realised this was somewhat stronger to say the least! Things fell. Shelving toppled. Neighbours went outside to see what was going on, to be told by me that it was just an earthquake.

An earthquake strong enough to be felt at any one specific place happens every five to ten years in the UK, whereas one strong enough to be felt at all at any place in the UK happens around twice a year. These are typically fairly weak events, maybe magnitude two or three. The widely felt Dudley earthquake of 2002 was a 4.7 and enough to be felt across the whole of England and Wales; It hit South Yorkshire, where I am, at about 3.0.

The Market Rasen earthquake of 2008 was a 5.2 at its epicenter (just 50km away) and still a good 5.0 when it reached me. Each integral, each one point, on the Richter scale is an energy difference of over thirty times. The 9.3 in Sumatra, 2006, yielding the deadly Asian Tsunami of Boxing Day, was over a million times more powerful.

But why do we get ‘quakes at all in the UK? We’re not on a faultline, we’re not anywhere near any volcanoes. Britain should be seismically dead, right? The reality isn’t quite so clear cut. Britain is on the move, but upwards, still rising back up after the ice melted only ten thousand years ago, two kilometers thick of ice depressed the land. We’re also being pushed east by the Atlantic seafloor spreading.

These forces, though gradual, build up. Britain’s geology, the rock that makes up the British Isles, is a mess. Old oceanic basalts from half a billion years ago, shales from the Jurassic, sandstones from the Cretaceous, coals from the Carboniferous, we’ve more geologic diversity beneath our feet than almost anywhere on Earth. All these rocks are bent, twisted by the incalculable forces of millions of years of tension, torsion and shifting. The rocks themselves are broken and faulted.

The current forces from our interglacial rebound and the mid-Atlantic ridge get caught up when our broken rocks snag on each other. Every few months, the rock breaks and the pressure is released; We get an earthquake. They’re usually small but every so often, maybe every five or ten years, we get one able to pass magnitude four.

Further reading on the British Geological Survey’s website, as well as realtime seismometer data.

Under the guise of destroying a potentially hazardous satellite, the United States successfully tested an anti-satellite missile west of Hawaii early this morning. While the official line from the White House was that the ailing spy satellite, USA 193, was a public hazard, few doubt that the test was in response to a similar Chinese test in 2007 which the US publically condemned.

The satellite never achieved functionality and so could not maintain orbit, it was due to re-enter uncontrolled in March, where it potentially could have caused damage. This is nothing new, spent rocket casings and old satellites re-enter twenty or more times a year, so why were the US so interested in this one? The official public line is that the hydrazine in the satellite’s fuel tanks was a danger to public health and indeed this is true, but satellites with hydrazine have come down before (one a year or so) and there’s been no missile shooting at them, the overwhelming odds are that the satellite with ditch harmlessly in an ocean, usually the Pacific. Being so volatile, the hydrazine escapes harmlessly into the atmosphere in just a few hours. You don’t want to be breathing it, but it doesn’t persist very long in the environment anyway.

Word on the street is that USA 193 wasn’t your ordinary Hubble Space Telescope pointed down (indeed, most spy satellites are quite similar to HST in construction, just far more advanced and much more expensive), instead a testbed for new technologies. It’d be quite embarrassing for the US were such a satellite to re-enter over China or Russia, allowing them to access its programming (was it really going to peek on Russian military secrets?) and technology. The risk to public health was acceptable, this thing has happened before, but the risk in giving away spy technology secrets to rival nations was not acceptable.

Pretending to care about public well-being is just easier for the politicians to say.

So being the local astronomy type, I’m often asked what I think of NASA’s Ares project. The aim is to put men back on the Moon and eventually to Mars. It’s the same as Apollo, a complete joke that we’ll fly and forget. Strong words, I’ll have to justify those.

In the early stages of Apollo, many within NASA strongly believed that the eventual aim was to build a lunar residency, a full time base on the Moon. Automated versions of the Lunar Module (LM) were kicked around and a smaller rocket to launch it, a step down from the Saturn V, since the Command and Service Modules wouldn’t be required to support human habitation for a week, just to be big cargo containers. After President Kennedy’s vision was realised, when Armstrong stepped out of the Tranquility Base LM, the political climate had shifted remarkably.

The support for Apollo petered off, even a few voices in NASA said “Okay, we’ve done it, let’s not tempt fate until someone gets killed.” Even Congressmen asked why it cost 40 million dollars to design and build a “golf cart”, grossly misunderstanding that said “golf cart” had to be built from scratch to operate in an airless environment with absolute reliability, it had to be tested, astronauts trained with it and by then, that 40 million was looking to be a very good deal; The Ford Mustang of the same vintage cost twice that to develop and design while modern cars cost even more, even if adjusted for inflation.

What started as a bold plan for long term lunar habitation became ten missions and finally only seven were flown, three of them fully built and ready but without the political support and national bravery to send them into the unknown.

Ares will be exactly the same thing. A few training and testing missions to the Moon, maybe two or three to Mars, then it’ll all be nudged under the carpet and referenced only in history books, paradoxically mentioning ‘national pride’ when the lack of that pride condemned the programme to history.

Ares might not even happen at all. While the military could afford quite easily to spend two billion dollars every ten hours in killing Iraqis, the budget for NASA just isn’t there. We’re still at the stage Apollo was at when they were picturing that automated LM and long term lunar bases, the stage where great things will happen, the stage before financial commitments are cut and political support evaporates.