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.

This one’s making the rounds on the ‘tubes. In summary, an emergency services call was made by a man in Wales about some bright thing in the sky…Which turned out to be the Moon.

It embodies the entire UFO thing, people who are unfamiliar with the sky seeing something unfamiliar to them and guessing what it might be. However, the sky can do a lot of unfamiliar things. Parhelia, iridium flares, satellite passes, planets[1], stars[1], birds[2] noctilucent clouds, tangent arcs, all things unfamiliar to the common man or woman, all things extremely common in “UFO” reports.

 There are two things at play here. First is a memory illusion, people tend to remember something bright as being big even if it isn’t big at all. My brother once said to me in the car “Did you see that big flying light that was following us?” and he described a glowing orb…Yet he’d been watching Venus which was certainly bright, but not at all big. He swore blind that he’d seen a sizeable orb, yet when I showed him Venus the next night, he agreed that was what he’d seen. The second is that memory is not a reliable testimony of events. Memory is half observation and half expectation; You see what you expect to see. If you expect that a bright unfamiliar thing in the sky is a flying saucer, you will see a flying saucer.

[1] Planets and stars may seem familiar to everyone, but few people realise how very bright the planets can become. Jupiter and Venus can be many times brighter than an aeroplane and, being stationary, they appear to follow a moving observer. Venus accounted for, according to the Ministry of Defence, almost 90% of all “UFO” reports when the MoD was collecting them; It isn’t anymore.

[2] Kenneth Arnold famously saw a V shaped formation of small (but bright) lights “like a saucer skipping on a lake”, describing how they jerkily moved. He was seeing geese in migration and, flying over mountains, he was in the shadow of a mountain and they were illuminated by the sun. Birds can look very bright in those conditions. Sunset looking towards a coast will also show you seabirds very brightly illuminated. The jerky motion was added by Kenneth’s light aircraft.

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?

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?

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.

It’s been touted so long that it has its own catchphrase. “Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted”, a term used derisively whenever any claim of anything that would harm the ‘net arises.

In the late ’90s, it was legislation crafted by ignorant lawmakers which outlawed vast swathes of online activities or technology. In the mid ’90s, it was a fear of running out of bandwidth, subscribers were signing up in such numbers that every three months the number of ‘net connected people was doubling.

As 1999 turned to 2000 and the dotcom bubble burst quite amusingly, various ‘experts’ claimed that the Internet was not viable for commercial operations, yet Google and Amazon, starting out as academic experiments and online bookstores respectively, have become corporate behemoths with valuations in the high billions.

The fickle nature of the net claims its casualties, however. Yahoo, once the darling of the web, saw its marketshare obliterated by a combination of MSN Messenger in the IM space and Google in the search space. Altavista, formerly the king of search engines, is now a little used curiousity next to the mighty Google.

So when we get alarmist re-runs of the Internet’s imminent death, it’s quite easy to turn a disbelieving eye.

The gist this time is that the ‘last mile’ is becoming too much of a problem. In 1998, the Internet became the World Wide Wait as users stuck on 56k modems managed to overwhelm websites full of graphics but this time it’s not the websites being overwhelmed, but the users themselves. The feed to the home is usually piggybacked on fibre or copper originally intended for television or telephone and it is these links which are becoming inadequate.

User generated content, such as what makes up the entirety of YouTube is growing exponentially and the bandwidth available to the home is not. BBC’s iPlayer has become so successful that many ISPs in Britain are throttling it back during the day, artificially slowing it down so it doesn’t clog their networks.

There are two key points of congestion to consider. Firstly, especially in the UK, most ISPs do not own any of their own infrastructure. Service providers like TalkTalk don’t own a single router, instead buying capacity from other service providers such as Tiscali or BT. Wanadoo have, even in their early Freeserve days, been a customer of Planet Online. It’s good business sense to buy as little capacity as possible, so the ISPs are deliberately throttling users during the day and even disconnecting heavier users.

BT, for example, market their “ideal for families” plan with a pathetic 5GB per month allowance. One child on YouTube over a rainy weekend can use that entire 5GB in just the weekend. Heavier users still, such as myself, can burn through 5GB in hours. With the advent of high definition content and services such as the BBC iPlayer, the end user bandwidth use is only going to get bigger.

This conveniently brings us to the next key congestion consideration: The last mile. A standard BT DSL link touted as “up to 8Mbps” is nothing of the kind, most users achieve between 3Mbps and 6Mbps. Even worse is that the upstream speed is a worthless 400kbps (448kbps, but ATM overhead ‘wastes’ one part of every nine), not even half of one Mbps. Wondered why uploading that video to YouTube was so slow? That’s why. Even the new ADSL2+ services, offering “up to 24Mbps” or 12Mbps are not any faster, usually offering only 400-600kbps upstream, let alone not improving download speed at all for anyone who already doesn’t get 6Mbps or more.

Cable’s even worse for many users, while it can theoretically go much faster, it is limited by the number of subscribers on one cable loop, usually an entire street or estate. A single fibre cable can perhaps handle 100Mbps or even less if it’s being loaded with many TV channels. A copper cable is a bit worse. Divide that up by the 8Mbps being offered to most cable subscribers and you have a grand total of twelve people who can use the service at full speed. Add a thirteenth and the speed drops. Most residential cable loops have fifty to two hundred subscribers.

The last mile connection just isn’t getting any faster or any more spacious anywhere near quick enough to keep up with demand. Is it going to be a crunch? It’s too early to tell but signs are there that over 2009-2010, the web will become the World Wide Wait yet again as the limits of DSL and cable become the proverbial brick wall awaiting the unwary driver.

Hot on the news that Tony Blair hid his strong religious views while Prime Minister for fear of appearing a lunatic (which one would agree with, those who hear voices in their head telling them what to do tend to be, regardless of whether those voices pretend to be gods or not) is him now claiming that faith should have a stronger role in politics.

What?

Every single time any form of religion has got involved in politics, it has resulted in widescale repression, oppression and curtailment of freedom. In something as serious as running the bloody country, we need calm rational minds, not the irrational gibbering of someone hearing voices in his head from a ghost in the sky.

 Politics should be, indeed must be, secular. Is a Jew going to vote for a Muslim? Is a Muslim going to vote for a Christian? No, but all three would vote for a secular leader who isn’t going to favour either of the other two. Politicians should concentrate on the business of running the country not on the business of playing favourites with faith.

 Blair makes the hilariously misguided statement that “the world will be immeasurably poorer, more dangerous, more fragile and above all, more aimless - I mean without the necessary sense of purpose to help guide its journey - if it is without a strong spiritual dimension” and then somehow, I’m not at all sure how, equates this with requiring religion in politics. Is spirituality necessary for a sense of purpose? Mr. Blair seems to think so, he seems to think that it’d be “aimless” and “without a sense of purpose”. One would think a former British Prime Minister would choose his words better than to outright state that several million Buddhists, Atheists and non-practitioners are “aimless”. Once again, religion is a divisive force stirring only hatred and intolerance.

 Faith must not be tolerated in politics. It is favouritism, it’s immoral and downright wrong for a government.

Some recent high profile criminal investigations in which DNA evidence has played a key role (e.g. Mark Dixie, Steve Wright) have brought up the suggestion of a national DNA database, citing examples where if DNA had been on file, the guilty party would have been identified and caught much sooner, possibly averting a future offence, perhaps even saving lives.

Arguing against that is going to be extremely difficult but it must be done. It is fingerprinting the entire population from birth. It’s more than just fingerprinting, since two fingerprints can be very similar, it’s taking your very identity and storing it on file.

The problem is that the current paradigm is “if your DNA was there, so were you” when this is not the case. Let’s say I want to kill someone. I’m careful about it, I wear rubber gloves which I then incinerate, etc. I also leave a few traces of someone else’s hair there. Maybe I sat behind them on the bus and just picked it up from the seat. That someone is then convicted of murder on DNA evidence, I walk free.

Right now, DNA is taken on the successful conviction of an offence (actually, it’s taken during prosecution, but must be destroyed if the prosecution fails) and it covers four and half million Britons, or one in every thirteen of us. Yes, even petty theft or a drunken brawl.

Detective Superintendant Cundy, who headed the investigation into Mike Bowman’s conviction of murder, claimed that “a national DNA register - with all its appropriate safeguards - could have identified Sally Anne’s murderer within 24 hours” and we’re left wondering what those safeguards may be. The police got their man and successfully prosecuted him, is it really necessary to fingerprint us all to save a few days or weeks of an investigation?

What if we fall under the hands of an oppressive government, such as the BNP, who would use such information to racially profile people who could then be deported or otherwise oppressed? What if eugenics comes back into vogue, as it was in the mid-20th century, and you’re found to be a carrier of a genetic disease and barred from having children? That’s a “what if” scenario and, in democracy, the “what ifs” are the most important questions.

It can’t be allowed to happen, we cannot predict the actions of a future government. We must always assume the worst if we have any hope of defending ourselves from it. We must not give power to the government which they can abuse, it is our only mechanism of ensuring they do not abuse it.

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?