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.

That tradition, and our democracy itself, was plunged into doubt in late November 2008 after over 350 years. Metropolitan Police stormed the parlimentary offices of MP Damian Green (Conservative immigration spokesman), seized material, searched his personal homes and his official offices and detained him for nine hours.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims that the Home Office had no knowledge in advance of the raid, but former Home Secretary Michael Howard dismissed that claim, saying he would have been astonished if a police investigation into an MP was carried out without his knowledge. Obviously the Home Office instigated the investigation, how can it be that the Home Secretary did not know about it?

If, as his statement says, Gordon Brown nor any ministers were aware in advance and the Met acted “without either ministerial involvement or authorisation” (Home Office statement) then what the hell is going on? Michael Howard’s words speak best here “If nobody knew it tells you something about the way government is working at the present time, and about the relations between ministers and senior civil servants.”

The Liberal Democrats released a statement condemning in no uncertain words the actions and they have a very long history of disagreeing with practically everything the Conservatives have ever said. Nick Clegg, Lib-Dem leader, “This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy” while David Cameron, Conservative leader said “If they wanted to talk to Damian Green why not pick up the telephone and ask to talk to him.”

It is the duty of the Opposition to keep the Government on its toes and MPs have the right to hold ’sensitive’ information just as doctors do. Indeed, it is the constitutional purpose of the Opposition to do just these. The Government must be held to account for its actions and information of the public interest must be put in the public record, it is the duty of all MPs to do this.

To have Special Branch police burst into the offices of an MP, arrest him and conduct extensive searches is unacceptable. Whoever authorised this needs to be out of a job very quickly and steps taken to ensure it does not - cannot - ever happen again. Perhaps without the civil war this time, though.

The first one we ever imaged is this rather unassuming fellow below:

To make that image with HST, astronomers first had HST image an entirely uninteresting star of similar characteristics to the target star. Then they used an occulting disc. Then they subtracted the first image, of another star, away from the image. The result is almost all starlight being removed and a nice image of an accretion ring.

Big deal, we’ve seen those before. This one, however, has a planet. We knew about that too, the ring has a very sharply defined inner edge, so we knew just where to look.

This planet, named Fomalhaut b, is about double the mass of Jupiter. Yep, I deliberately didn’t use the star’s name until now because it’s a first magnitude naked eye star 25 light years away.

Oh, and it was imaged four years ago. It’s only been released today because work still needed to be done, such as this:

Shame I live too far north for Fomalhaut to ever get more than a few degrees above the horizon.

The second, third and fourth planets are orbiting HR8799. It’s in Pegasus, it’s about 130 light years away, it’s an otherwise unremarkable A5V main sequence dwarf at 1.5 solar masses (so very young, since it’s very hot for its mass - Literature gives the age as 6 million years) right on the edge of naked eye visibility at magnitude 6.0. It has three planets and we’ve directly seen all three:

This image is from Keck, but they also have an IR image from Gemini North. All three planets are fairly big, B being at least 5x the mass of Jupiter (and likely 7-8), C and D being ten Jupiter masses. D orbits at a semimajor axis of 24 AU, C at 38 AU and B at 68 AU. It’s quite likely that there’s a whole family of smaller gas giants and terrestrial planets closer in.

Expect news of more and more over the coming year as the technique gets refined and more teams pick it up.

For more reading on the subject, Googles for “HR 8799″ and “Fomalhaut” will pick up n^pi news articles on the subject.

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.

First though, some background. The Middle East is now largely a Muslim area and other religions tend to find themselves persecuted. Violently persecuted. But one state in the Middle East was secular - ardently so - at least until 2003. There, the Mandaeans numbered in the tens of thousands, hardly a great faith but in no danger.

That state was Iraq. Its leader, Saddam Hussein, was ardently devoted to maintaining a progressive, modern secular state and its people enjoyed liberties that the Iranians, Saudis and such could never dream of. This caused quite a lot of conflict as Muslims aren’t too keen on sharing a town with other Muslims (Sunni vs Shi’ite, for example) let alone another religion entirely but officially, Hussein’s government did not favour anyone over anyone else. That’s now all changed, of course, a Muslim government is in power, Muslim laws are being passed and Sharia law is enforced for the first time in many decades.

With the fall of Hussein’s secular administration and the rise of what is essentially a democratic theocracy (vote for who you want, as long as they’re Muslim and have the right Muslim ideals), the Mandaeans have been all but eradicated. From 40,000 under Hussein, there are now likely fewer than 5,000.

The Mandaeans date back long before Christianity and at their peak, they were as widespread in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia Minor as the Egyptians, Hebrews and Mithrans. When the Hebrews codified Judaism, largely with the compilation of the Torah, they weren’t the only ones picking which stories were holy and which were apocrypha. There were many, a great many and the Mandaeans were another. Their Holy Scripture has many of the same books as the Torah (The Christian Old Testament is identical to the Torah) but differs in just as many and some of the stories are closer to their original Babylonian and Sumerian versions.

Being from the same Hebrew culture as the Jews, the Mandaeans have many of the same restrictions on things like diet. They worship the Abrahamic deity Yahweh, as do the Jews, Christians and Muslims and they have several holy people associated with it, Adam, Sheet, Sam bin Noah and Yahya bin Zekaria. The first three should be familiar to anyone who’s ever read through a Torah or Old Testament (all four are in the Christian Bible and Muslim Koran), but the latter is one we are most concerned with.

Yahya bin Zekaria is the original name of John the Baptist. You may consider John the Baptist (literally: John the True) to be a Biblical or Koranic figure but he was far more than just that. The area of the time was occupied by the Romans and the Hebrews really didn’t like this. Mithran, Mandaean, Jewish, they were all pissed off. Many “Messiahs” rose up to rally the Hebrews and deliver them from the Romans as prophecised in the Torah.

We know two of them met each other, Jesus the Christ and John the True, such is in the New Testament and the Koran. However, there were MANY more. Both Jesus and John failed, they did not get rid of the Romans as they promised (and Jesus failed quite spectacularly, being executed for his part in the uprising - The Resurrection wasn’t added to the story until a few centuries later) but not all of them failed quite so badly.

Simon bar Kochba (Simon of The Star, refering to the Star of David) in 120 AD actually succeeded, though the Romans came back and did to him what they’d done to Jesus the Christ barely eighty years before. Simon, for his part, denounced Jesus the Christ as an apparition of Satan sent to test the faithful. It mattered little, his success was the greatest of all recorded Messiahs but four years later it was reversed.

Another Simon, Simon the Christ (or Simon Magus) was also popular around the time of Jesus, so much so that the New Testament discusses his deeds in Acts (8:9-11) and the early Christian apocrypha ‘Acts of Peter’ goes into quite some detail as to how Peter was quite comprehensively out-competed by Simon the Christ.

Even a Roman got in on the act, Apollonius Tyana who is recorded wandering around performing miracles, healing the sick, raising the dead, and so on.

Of the many, only two really remained in the popular psyche. Simon of The Star was quickly forgotten, the Romans saw to that, executing his core followers and destroying what records there were. However, John the True was a Mandaean himself and met Jesus the Christ who we believe was either a Jew or a Mithran, he did perform several rituals associated with both - The Last Supper was the Mithran Eucharist where the wine and bread symbolise the blood and body of Mithra, Jesus obviously knew about it because they’d been doing it thousands of years before his birth. We suspect the records were corrupted somehow and we came to believe that Jesus was arrogantly placing himself as Mithra, it is very unlikely this is what he meant. Mithra, to be clear, was the god of the Mithrans and a rather interesting meld of the Egyptian Sun God Ra and the Abrahamic Yahweh. Not unknown, the Old Testament contains many Egyptian stories.

So it’s not just a bit of oil we’ve fought a war over. It’s not just a few thousand obscure cultists who may die out now the last secular Middle East state has been handed to the Muslims. It’s a living window into the conditions, times and people who lived two thousand years ago in the Middle East and their lasting legacy to today.

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.

I’m not so sure. Smoking was in decline anyway, before the measures of the last five or so years (which have not altered the decline rate), public smoking ban or not, the numbers would have been about the same. Let’s take a look at those figures again, though. Adjusting for inflation we see that ten years ago, we spent £2.38 billion (2008 pounds) on smoking-related illnesses and in real terms, the outlay has only increased by £320,000 - Or about the price of ten years of care for two breast cancer (which isn’t smoking related) patients.

Now let’s take a look at demographics, the thing the anti-smoking lobby doesn’t want you to see. That’s right, we have the 1950s and 1960s baby boomers reaching their 50s and 60s, ages where smoking-related illnesses typically take hold. Why’s the figure increasing then? Because the population is getting older - There are more older people! Unless Ash would prefer us leading our senior citizens to the gas chambers, they’re just going to have to live with it.

The anti-smoking lobby and particularly Ash, have been traditionally a very deceptive bunch. They go on about how much the NHS loses a year and how it’d better be spent on other illnesses (appeal to emotion fallacy) but what they don’t say is that in the tax year 2007-2008, HM Treasury recieved £8 billion in tobacco tax of cigarettes alone, discounting things like hand-rolling tobacco, pipe tobacco and the smaller specialist tobaccos such as chewing and snuff which add up to around another billion. Smokers pay for their own treatment through tobacco taxes and, indeed, are perhaps the only group in the UK who cover their NHS expenses near-directly. They also turn the Treasury quite a tidy profit of £5 billion too.

If anti-smoking programmes are successful, that £5 billion hole in Treasury funds will have to come from somewhere else…like perhaps the NHS.

No part of this post should be seen as supportive of tobacco use. Repeated and valid scientific study has shown that there is no harmless lower bound for tobacco use, any regular use at all at any level is significantly harmful to health and in particular directly linked to chronic and fatal cardiac and pulmonary diseases. Indirect use (passive smoking) is another matter entirely, however.

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

Ten minutes later I got home, grabbed a camera and even though it’d faded away a bit, I managed to get an image of it. (Click to embiggenificate)

These things are notorious for not showing up well in photographs but hey, that’s why we have Photoshop right? A little digital shenaniganry and the photo’s not at all like you’d see it with your eyes but shows the sun pillar much better.

What’s going on here then? Part of the clue is at the top of the image - cirrus clouds. They’re made of ice crystals at high altitude and these crystals form a hexagonal cylinder shape. If they get long, they’re called rods but if they stay short, they’re plates (Snowflakes have the same basic shape) and it’s these plates which cause the sun pillar. As sunlight reflects off the bottom of them, they glint. As they’re very distant and very small, we see their combined light as a glow. As they’re falling from the cirrus clouds, and because they’re falling flat, we see the glow as a column or a pillar.

Look up more, it’s amazing what you can see there.