Liberty - for the week

I'm away, enjoying a week of holiday.  Guess where I am.

Liberty, equality and fraternity

It looks as though I might be in New York, but instead I find myself in Paris again, seeing some of the sites that I have never seen before, and visiting others, like this one, that I have seen from the train many times.

This is a 9m tall replica of the Statue of Liberty, and it can be found on the Isle des Cygnes in the middle of the River Seine.

Replica Statue of Liberty in Paris, on the Isle des Cygnes

Having walked the length of Isle des Cygnes I didn't see a single swan.

Did you know that is where we get the English word 'cygnet'?

Inverse topiary

Cruising down the River Thames, near Reading, I found that the graffiti artists have an unusual technique.  They cut away the ivy on a railway embankment wall to leave their friendly message.

Topiary as graffiti

Downloading consciousness?

Have you heard of the '2045 Project'?  I started to hear a few whispers about this fascinating and seemingly impossible idea recently.

Founded by a wealth Russian entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov, in February 2011, the project aims to develop the technology required to download a human mind into a robot avatar, essentially extending life, perhaps as far as immortality.  By that time Itskov will be about 65 years old.

Interesting!  Apart from the obvious worry about choosing exactly the right moment to kill your real self and transfer your 'soul' (for want of a better word) into a machine, there must be no end of other moral implications.  Does the 'robot you' then have human rights?  Does it have the right to reproduce, and if so, what algorithms go into the production of the offspring.  Is there a way to make the mingling of computerised brainwaves sound like a romantic encounter, and if not, in what way could this being be described as being fully human?  And if the avatar offspring went through the terrible twos while it effectively inhabited an adult body, how would the parents cope?

I can't resist asking whether it forces God out of the picture too?  After all, which part of the new synthetic 'you' did God create?  Unlike the conventional type of 'intelligent design', the success of this project might demonstrate that ID is real.

If it happens in your lifetime you can decide for yourself.

Fast trains or fusion?

The surprising thing is that someone else has finally noticed that we are not spending enough money on developing fusion as the power source of the future!

Andrew Steele wrote in the Guardian:

In among a raft of new infrastructure spending announced by the UK government in the wake of last week's spending review, it was revealed that the cost estimates for the HS2 high-speed train line had been revised significantly upward. According to the new projections, HS2 will be completed in 2033 at a total cost of £42.6bn for construction and £7.5bn for trains – a total of just over £50bn.

What is immediately striking about this figure is that it's about the same as estimates of how much it will cost to develop nuclear fusion to the point at which it could supply affordable electricity to the grid.

What is also strikingly missing is that the £50 billion for HS2 is being paid by the British taxpayer, whereas the $50 billion estimated for fusion could be shared by all the countries in the world.  That makes it much more affordable.

However, in general Steele gets the point.  Good for him!

Taking rice cereusly

Yes that was a deliberate mis-spelling, and yes it was meant to sound like 'seriously'.

Why is it that we are warned not to reheat the leftovers from a Chinese takeaway on the following day?

I had always assumed that it was because of risks associated with the prawns or chicken ingredients, but I was surprised to find out recently that this is not the case.  Some rice is contaminated with a bacteria called Bacillus Cereus, and certain strains of it are harmful to humans.  The bacteria exists in the raw cereal in the form of spores which are activated by moisture during cooking.  If the cooking is not thorough enough, some survive and as the rice cools, they multiply they produce a toxin, cereulide, which gives us food poisoning.  That toxin is not broken down by further cooking.

I must admit that I'm not very keen on rice.  It tends to taste slightly bitter to me, although I do enjoy fried rice with my Chinese dishes.  Little did I know that fried rice is one of the most risky forms.  If the rice has been boiled insufficiently, then not refrigerated quickly but subsequently re-cooked then it is at its most dangerous!

I think I still trust my favourite Chinese takeaway place though.  I always enjoy the food that they cook.

See another interesting an informative article here.

Surprisingly rare

As my regular readers will have noticed, Thursday was one of those surprisingly rare days when I didn't get chance to post anything.  The only other time that it happened was due a technical fault, but this time I was simply detained by work until 1 a.m. 

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Quarantine

Sometimes we find that familiar words have surprising backgrounds.  Today was one of those times.

I know the word 'quarantine' in English, and the word 'quarante' (forty) in French.  Somehow I had never made the link.

Apparently the term quarantine comes from an old Venetian dialect word 'quaranta', which obviously comes from the same roots. 

It all started off with trying to avoid the consequences of the plague (or 'Black Death') in the 14th century.  The earliest quarantines were only for 30 days, but later they adopted 40 days as standard.

Hence quarantine!

Swimming the Thames

Boating on the canals is quite different from boating on the River Thames.

The protocols for the locks are different.  Finding a free mooring on the river is much more difficult.  And the river is much wider and deeper.

But after nearly a week on the Thames the biggest surprise is to find people swimming.  You spot a couple of things bobbing about in the water, not far from the bank and you might wonder whether they are ducks or geese, even though they don't look quite right.

They turn out to be swimmers - and these swimmers are not unusual.  Apparently people swim the whole length of the river as a badge of honour.

People don't swim in the canals.

The sound of one hand clapping

Buddhists (I believe) use the expression 'the sound of one hand clapping' to represent something that is not possible, something transcendent that can be imagined but that cannot be achieved.  They think that it is a sound that is silent.

There is only one problem.

I can do it and it is not silent.  My father could do it, and I always remember when I was a boy, wondering how he could make it happen, when I couldn't do it myself.

When my hands got bigger I somehow realised that I could do it too, and I have gently made fun of my own children in the same way that my father did of me.  At last one of them can do it too - albeit quietly.  With practise he can carry the tradition to the next generation.

The recipe is to keep your fingers quite straight and close all four of them against your palm quite quickly.  Perhaps it helps to have long fingers, and my family seems to have the genes for that.

Try it . . . and refute a Zen Buddhist!

Inside a hot air balloon

Have you ever flown in a hot air balloon?

If not, this view from the basket into the balloon with the burner ignited might be a surprising new sight for you.

Inside John's balloon - thanks to Mildred.

 At the very least, it is a pretty picture.

Brilliant people might not be the most productive

I used to report to a director, but via matrix management work for another utterly brilliant man.  When it came to detail, I felt like an intellectual-dwarf compared with either.  But looking at the situation in a different way I review it like this.

When I went to my director with a good idea I would come out of the meeting with an even better idea.

When I went to my day-to-day boss with an idea, I would return with three more ideas!  (None of them were mine but all were sensible.)

Both of them were brilliant men (and still are).  Neither of them had the talents of making a decision to do anything nor of making things happen, nor the talent of making people follow them.  I respect and like both of them in spite of those flaws.

After that I worked for someone who had none of the intellectual prowess of my previous bosses, and yet he seemed to be able to gather followers and lead the ordinary people in the direction that he required - whether it was for the company or for personal gain - whether the followers recognise that they were merely being used or not.

This sort of thing seems to have happened frustratingly often throughout my professional career.

So it seems to me to be clear that the most brilliant intellects have no chance of prevailing in the real world.  That probably means that a perfect world will never be achieved.  Incidentally, only one of the above - the one who I least respect - has children.

Is this happening the world over?  Does this make tomorrow's planned demonstrations 'The Big IF' in London a waste of time?  I won't be going, but I will certainly be writing about it.

The world is complicated isn't it?

Another well-defaced road-sign

It seems to be a tradition to deface No Entry signs in Europe's cities.  Does it happen in other parts of the world?  Paris seems to be the capital of this type of graffiti.

Parisienne graffiti - no entry.

Very tastefully executed!

Just a feather

Watch this amazing performance by Miyoko Shida Rigolo via Facebook (even if you don't have a Facebook account) and you will not regret the few minutes that you spend.  The haunting background music beautifully compliments the performance.

What a difference a feather makes - Miyoko Shida Rigolo's balancing act

The metaphor of the feather maintaining the balance shouldn't escape our notice, but there is no need to take this as a lesson for anything in particular.  Just be amazed!

Watch to the very end.  I'm confident that it will surprise you pleasantly.

Turning in their graves

This week on BBC Radio 4 a reporter was interviewing some of the people of Woolwich where there was a high profile murder of a serving soldier - allegedly by two young Muslim men.

The news story is far from funny, but one of the interviewees said something that made me hoot with laughter.

They claimed that our grandfathers fought for this country, and if they were alive now they would be turning in their graves.

Humour gets everywhere!

Only dead fish go with the flow

We are often exhorted to 'go with the flow'.  But as the name on the side of this narrowboat suggests . . .

Only dead fish go with the flow

. . . only dead fish go with the flow!

Test your grammar

Just a quick post tonight.

If you think you are good at grammar, try this test.  (Sorry if it doesn't work outside UK, but I think it will.)

I'm embarrassed to say that I only scored eight out of ten, but then again it is obvious that a devious mind produced two of the questions!

The bite of the honey bee

Yes - I meant bite, not flight, and honey bee, not bumble bee.  But having misused the name of a famous piece of music for rhetorical purposes, here is a surprising (and interesting) bit of information about the familiar insects that are so important for our crop pollination.

You would think that we know nearly everything that there is to know about bees, but it seems that this is not the case.  Now we discover that bees bite and that the bites have a surprising role in the evolutionary struggle between the bees and their parasites.

This interesting information about bees came to my attention in the newsletter of the British Beekeeper's Association (BBKA).  This is not a journal that I have ever read before, but I happened across a well-written article in the February 2013 edition of the magazine. 

Even though the bite phenomenon had been recognised previously, it was not known that it is used to inject a natural anaesthetic called 2-heptanone (2-H).  When bees bite their enemies the 2-H temporarily paralyses the victim and this gives the colony the chance to eject the creature from the hive.  Bees actively use this method to fight the larvae of moths and the parasite varroa which is often heralded as bringing certain death to colonies of bees.

So it seems that bees do have a natural defence against enemies that are too small to sting.

It has been suggested that 2-H might even have a use as a new natural anaesthetic for humans too. Isn't nature amazing?

The BBKA magazine also gets another plaudit from me.  Unlike the article in the Daily Telegraph, the BBKA takes the trouble to reference the scientific paper on the subject by Dr Alexandros Papachristoforou, of the University of Thessaloniki in Greece.  You can find it on the free online, peer-reviewed, PLOS ONE web site at this link.  It gets technical, as all scientific papers ought to do, but the introduction and many other parts are written very clearly and accessibly.  Everyone would get something from the introduction.

Small note:  In the news in recent weeks, people of Europe, particularly UK, have heard a lot about the banning of various pesticides that are alleged to affect bee colonies.  I say 'alleged' because it seems to be a slightly controversial example of science being misused in a public campaign to obtain signatures to promote the passage of legislation.  Unlike many of the campaigns of organisations of 38 degrees, Avaaz and other such bodies, this one about neo-nicotinoids perhaps demonstrates that good science cannot always be applied through democracy.

My two 'spirit guides'

A dear friend told me today that I have invisible companionship.

This is not just one spirit guide, but two!  Apparently not everyone is blessed in this way, but it is far from unusual.  My friend claims to have more guides than me.

I find it genuinely interesting that I know people who believe in things that I can't recognise in the world.  My Christian friends know God through his son Jesus (in spite of all that nonsense about the Trinity which makes no real sense to anyone as far as I can tell).  My Islamic friends have faith in Allah and his prophet Mohamed (upon whom I wish no peace or blessing whatsoever).  At least Islam is a little less 'spooky', even though I find it more frightening in other ways.  And my own sister sees ghosts and has always been much more sensitive to the paranormal than I am.

I'm almost jealous of them.  It seems that I am missing this special, interesting, sixth sense.

I don't even believe that we have souls in this dualistic sense, so I find it very difficult to believe in ghosts or spirits.  But I am still fascinated by the idea.

As for these invisible companions who (apparently) know so much about me, very little has been revealed.  They don't have names and nothing is known of the lives that they no longer have.  Both are (or were?) male, which I find genuinely surprising since the minority of my close friends would want to claim that. 

Apparently one is mischievous and the other is 'a free spirit'.  What that happens to say about me is unclear.

What questions can I ask my friend to find out more about my guides?  Your input would be useful.  Please leave a comment if you can help.  I can already think of a few questions.

• Have they chosen me of have I chosen them?
• Do they like me?
• Do they 'guide' anyone else?

Any more?

Adam Rutherford at Oxford Skeptics

The speaker at Oxford Skeptics in the Pub this week was one of the best yet.  Adam Rutherford engaged an audience of about 60, speaking on the subject of 'Creation'.   The event was held in a new location, the St Aldate's Tavern.  A good choice, I must say!

When I say that he engaged the audience, he used wit and wisdom to answer questions and challenges in the most interesting round-about ways, and yet still managed to give a satisfactory answer.

There is no point trying to give an account of the talk that he gave.  I will just note a few of the things that I found surprising.

• The family tree of Charles II of Spain, the last of the Hapsburgs, with all its inter-generational loops.
• The Murchison meteorite, which contains traces of one of the four letters of the genetic code - one that we find it difficult to synthesise here on Earth.  (And yet the hypothesis of panspermia was rejected as non-scientific.  Apparently it is a nice idea but there is no evidence for it.)
• That the Miller-Urey experiment was actually more successful than originally thought.  In fact, it produced all 20 essential amino acids - many more than there were able to identify at the time.
• A definition of life - "Life is the opposite of decay"
• GM cress which detects land mines by changing colour - and yet is not on the market due to an intellectual property dispute.

These and a few others were the highlights of the evening.  Congratulations to Heather for finding such a good speaker.

A great evening out!  If you get chance to see him you should take it.

Small note: Boo to Martin Robbins for trying to be more than an 'ordinary member' of the audience.  He wasn't a very interesting speaker when he was supposed to be the speaker, and he wasn't much better as a member of the audience.

"The Fly"

At my place of work we have a system for reporting accidents and near misses, as do most places of work.  Sometimes people make informative and factual reports, with or without grammatical errors, but once in a while a modern classic gets into the system.

One such report went like the following paragraph.  I have edited it slightly but only to correct the punctuation and not to change the words or meaning.  In local folk-lore it is now known as "The Fly". 


[Our building] has a fly problem. Recently a large bug zapper has been installed. It's very impressive. Whilst waiting for a key exchange I observed several winged insects meet their end in the device. One in particular was most spectacular, lodging between the electrodes and catching fire as the miniature lightning bolts seared over its dancing carcass. Then its fried insides explosively outgassed through a weakness in its exoskeleton and the flaming body erupted from the grill. Clearing the insect collection plate it tumbled down under the force of gravity onto the paperwork beneath, still aflame. The solid paper sheets didn't have me launching out of the seat to beat them out, but had the remains landed in the tissue box I suspect it would be a different story.

Of course the author has to remain anonymous, but I credit him all the same.