Physics on the Metro

Have you ever spotted how the air moves on metro trains?

On ordinary trains with short carriages there is often a flow of air through the carriage as the train moves along.  It brings blessed relief on those hot summer days!

But something different happens on those trains that are open from one end to the other, and the effect depends strongly on the number of people on the train.

One of those long un-divided trains on Paris metro line 1

If the train is fairly empty, you get a strong rush of air from the front to the back as it accelerates.  Quite often the train accelerates in steps, and you get repeated breezes of different strengths, correlating well with the driver's actions.  Then as the train slows down, the air rushes to the front of the train.

This shows that the mass of air inside the train has to be pushed to get it to speed up and slow down.  The push comes from a pressure gradient which is set up as the train changes velocity.  That gradient is established by filling one end of the train with more air, increasing the local pressure.

I had spotted this happening on a journey on an empty train.  The following day on the same metro line I was expecting to observe the same effect.   However, it happened to a much less noticeable extent.  What was different?  The train was full of people standing.  That meant that the air flow was significantly better damped.

The effect is also much clearer if you sit near the middle of the train than it is at the ends - obviously.  After a week of observations I think this is good(ish) physics.

On the other hand . . . on another journey I watched a roller skater walking down stairs (very carefully) and then rolling along the platform.  As he slowed himself down he spread his feet wide apart, lowering his centre of gravity.  To stop himself he brought them sharply back together, lifting his whole body a few centimetres.  It appeared to me at first sight that he had converted his kinetic energy into potential energy in doing this - but on reflection that is not consistent with conservation of momentum.  This wasn't good physics after all.

Perhaps it was just a flourish in his performance after all.

Isn't physics fun?  It gets everywhere!

Prince Rupert's legacy

Watching a TV programme recently (which is something that I rarely do) I was reminded of the incredible properties of glass.  Can you imagine a glass bulb that will not break when you hit it with a hammer, and yet will explode violently in the event of another tiny intervention.

If not, you will be amazed by Prince Rupert's Drops.  Wikipedia has a good article on the topic (as you would expect), but this video is also spell-binding and explanatory!

BBC film crews

Having been somewhat involved with the workings of a BBC film crew yesterday, for a programme that will be hosted by Richard Hammond, I am left with a few observations about BBC film crews.

The staff all seemed to be polite, pleasant and reasonable people.  They even gave the impression of understanding what our technical staff were talking about - at least when they took the time to listen.  I was surprised to hear the producer asking one of his interviewees not to dumb it down so much - and this was for a science programme on the BBC.  Yes really!

I suppose this is not a proper science programme like Horizon.  Perhaps Sunday evening specials are allowed to present real science instead?

Another surprise was that they preferred to film in very low light, to the extent that most of the people who were trying to do a real job, operating a complex fusion machine, were complaining that they couldn't see what they were doing.  Most film crews from other TV stations including the independents can cope with the normal lighting conditions, but it will be interesting to see the difference when the programme comes out.  Perhaps it will be spectacularly better than average.

And yes - it is true that Hammond is not a tall man.

But the biggest surprise is that the film crew must have numbered at least a dozen people.  Like the last time I saw a BBC crew for a high profile programme in action, I wondered what most of them were supposed to be doing.  Not much, from all appearances!  Funded by the tax payer, it seems that they can afford to employ four or five times more staff than most other companies.

After all, these are times of austerity.

Skeptical about Skeptoid - go for green instead!

The Skeptoid podcast has been one of my favourites for two or three years, and Brian Dunning's analyses of the topics that he covers generally have my trust.  One or two things might have influenced my views about Dunning recently, but setting aside accusations of fraud that have echoed around the skeptical community (if indeed it really is a singular community) in this week's episode I think he actually has a couple of things dangerously wrong.

He was talking about laser pointers.  Are they really dangerous?

Obviously the answer is that some of them are indeed a hazard, but I have to point out that his reasoning to determine which are safe is far from my own understanding of the topic, and advice from laser safety experts.

Dunning's approach was correct in pointing out that the human eye is more sensitive to green light than red, but his conclusion was the opposite of normal thinking.  The reason might be that he has incorrectly assumed that increased sensitivity (i.e. ability to perceive the smallest amounts of light) correlates with sensitivity to damage (which it does not).  The brightness of some green pointers is truly scary, but not all of them are actually dangerous.

Damage to the eye is caused by power, not by apparent brightness.  OK - you might have a coloured spot in your vision for longer if the light seems brighter, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have damaged your retina.  On the other hand, infra-red lasers can easily blind you without seeming bright.  Indeed they can do their terrible damage invisibly.  (I work with people who operate IR lasers which would only be eye-safe at a distance of 20,000km by they way.)

In fact, the science in the above claims should be interpreted in this way.  Green pointers appear brighter than red pointers for the same power.  So a red 1 mW laser pointer seems surprisingly dim compared with a green pointer of the same power.  To compensate for this, people are tempted to buy higher power red pointers.  You might need tens of milliwatts to compete with 1 mW of green.  This is where the danger lies.

Brian Dunning's conclusion that you should never use a green pointer is misleading and potentially dangerous.  You should use green wherever possible, but just ensure that its 'peak output power' is less than 1 mW, not the 1 to 5 mW that Dunning recommended.

Then you can be certain that your audience's eyes will be safe.  You should still avoid shining the light direct into anyone's eyes though.

Small note:  There is a theoretical potential failure mode for green lasers, where they go to even higher power.  If you spot your pointer getting much brighter then you should get it tested.  In my own experience they seem to get dimmer with time, but this is only a matter of statistics (and perhaps ageing eyes?).

New RDFRS newletter revealed

The Richard Dawkins Foundation(s) for Reason and Science (RDFRS) have released a newsletter, the first one being available here.  (As you might know, there are two RDFRSs.)

Being a fan of Richard Dawkins and his work (as many of you will have spotted a long time ago) I eagerly clicked the link to see what fascinating information it might contain.  Richard has such a good way of spotting interesting things and presenting them in accessible ways.  I thought there was a good chance that it would be another thing that I would subscribe to, but unlike many of the others that I almost dread having to read, this one was going to be something that I would be eager to see.

So - did it live up to my expectations?  Perhaps the existence of two separate but linked foundations, East and West of the Atlantic might make it difficult to choose the content.  There was quite a good article by Sean Faircloth who is a powerful speaker and writer, but apart from that there was a bit of advertising (which I accept as being necessary), mention of a new member of staff (yawn! who cares?) and a selection of other articles that failed to get my full attention.

All in all, I have to say that I found it surprisingly disappointing. 

Let's not give up on them too soon, as they might find their feet and decide which country they really want to talk to.  I don't really mind which one it is, as I do listen to a number of US-centric podcasts.  However, most of those give UK a greater degree of prominence than the first edition of this newsletter has done, from its American heartland.

Very little of Richard's flair and enthusiasm comes through just yet.  Please try harder.

Now if you want a really good newsletter, (which happens to be UK based), you could do worse than that of the National Secular Society, which you can find here.  I actually look forward to getting that one by e-mail every Friday.

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.

Does Creation science have any convincing arguments?

Oxford Skeptics in the Pub hosted Peter Harrison this week.  He is based at St Andrews University (of which I am a graduate) so it was fun to have a chat with him.  His talk was about creationism.  As it said on the SITP site:

It’s easy to make fun of many creationist claims, but what are their strongest arguments?

Creationism often takes a lot of flak for the kind of wild claims made by hoards of ALL-CAPS creationists on blogs and YouTube comments. But of all the claims and arguments made by creationists, which are the most impressive? Do they pose a threat to creationism-denying scientific fields? Forget the usual tired canards. Peter has spent a year collaborating with top creationist organisations and groups to collate and bring to you their most powerful arguments yet…

So, I hear you asking whether any of the arguments were convincing.  He had asked them about both their evidence for creationism and in four of the five cases for evidence that the world is young (6000 to 10,000 years old).  The fifth organisation promotes old-earth crationism so it was not relevant in their case.

The organisations that he had challenged included Answers in Genesis and The Discovery Institute.  It seems that they have now ceased to cooperate with him after he shared his conclusions with them.  They didn't even appear to have used their best lines of evidence even while they were talking, but then again who is the best judge of that?

One thing did surprise me.  In his discussions with the 'Discoveroids', he had used the term 'creationist'.  I happen to listen to their podcast, ID The Future (which I decline to link to, as I have no desire to increase their Google ranking) on a regular basis.  They usually make a point that The Discovery Institute is there to promote 'Intelligent Design', and not creationism.  They say that there is a difference, although I have some doubts about that.

All in all, it was an entertaining evening with a great speaker.  It was only the second time that he has given that talk.  I hope he will get chance to use it many more times.

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.

JET - 30 years old, and still state-of-the-art!

Today is the 30th anniversary of the first day of operation of the Joint European Torus, JET, and it is still the most successful fusion device in the world.  That's both a great opportunity to celebrate and a tragedy at the same time

During two days of celebration various eminent speakers told stories of their experiences and shared anecdotes.  Paul-Henri Rebut, the father of the JET project spoke of the friendly rivalry between the JET team and their American competitors in Princeton who built the machine called TFTR.  He explained that there had been a wager relating to a specific milestone in the operation of the two machines.  It was agreed that the team that first achieved a plasma current of one million amps for one second would host the other team for a celebration meal.  The losing team would travel across the Atlantic and bring the wine.  As a Frenchman, Rebut was glad to have won the wager but regretted the consequential need to drink Californian wine!


Other speakers spoke of the fun of operating the JET facility (which is still true) and yet the responsibility for delivering results to compensate for the expenditure (which is also true).   At least twice it was claimed that JET is the oldest operating tokamak in the world, but that is assuredly untrue.  As they could easily discover at www.tokamak.info, this honour probably goes to a machine that is currently called GOLEM, in Prague, having been moved and renamed three times.  It was built in about 1963, under the name TM1 (with the M translating from Russian as "small".)

However, nobody could doubt that JET has been the most successful.

The successful life of JET is indeed worthy of celebration, and with good fortune it will run for several years to come.  However, real progress in fusion depends on many challenges in addition to the obvious technical issues.  One of them is the recruitment, training and retention of the next generation of 'fusioneers'.  Given that the 'industry joke' says that fusion is 30 years away and always has been, some might be reluctant to join the field.  (I have blogged about that topic before - with optimism, here and here).

One of the speakers reported that recruitment of brilliant young students is still not difficult but retaining their enthusiasm in a field that moves so slowly can be more challenging.  This is made worse by the lack of that friendly spirit of competition that drove progress in the 1980s.

The tragedy that I mentioned at the beginning is that 30 years ago fusion scientists had big plans to build a machine to take over from JET and push the research forwards.  They designed a bigger and better machine in a project called "NET".  This 'Next European Torus' was a machine big enough to prove the success of fusion technology.  In USA, Russia  and Japan similar large projects were being proposed at the same time, and politicians and bureaucrats managed to resist these ambitions in every case.  How sad. How tragic.

Instead of doing NET we got ITER and lost 20 years. 

Is there any hope of regaining some competition for the international project ITER?  Officially and diplomatically the answer has to be 'no'.

However, China has been training fusions scientist at the rate of 100 per year for at least a decade.  Should we worry about that or should we celebrate the likely source of competition from China?  Certainly they have the ambition to take things forward and they have built an impressive machine called EAST.  One way or another, Europe needs to take fusion much more seriously and face up to the investment.  Instead of spending the equivalent of a pint of milk per European per year, in the spirit of standardising on sensible units of measurement couldn't we at least push that to the equivalent of a litre of beer, if not cognac? After all, by comparison the photo-voltaic power industry last year alone had a turnover of around 100 billion Euros. This is big money and comes from the pockets of the taxpayers too.

Neither technology is the perfect solution but the world needs both (along with the rest of the power portfolio) if an energy crisis is to be avoided.

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!

Dennett's Tools for Thinking

I find it very interesting and informative and in fact generally pleasurable to listen to philosopher, 'horseman of the apocalypse', and grand-fatherly gentleman Daniel C Dennett. 

He has a new book to sell, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, so we might have the enjoyment of hearing a lot of interviews.  This week I heard a good one, on the podacst Point of Inquiry.

It is a wide ranging discussion with host, Indre Viskontas, (direct link here) they mull over a wide range of interesting topics, including consciousness, the 'intentional stance' (which others call 'theory of mind'), the role of philosophy in today's world, and that old favourite, free-will.  The book gets a few mentions, but not in any sense is the interview a hard-sell.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, or can load it onto your MP3 to enjoy while you are doing something that doesn't need concentration, I recommend it highly.

Will I buy the book?  That is a different question entirely.  I would love to have time to understand Dennett's writings and have read a couple of his earlier books.  However, I have also failed to reach the end of a couple of others due to my own ability to concentrate and my preference for being active.  

Maybe I should wait for the paperback - or maybe that is where I went wrong previously as the writing gets too small.

The Times carries outrageous MMR headline

Seeing a copy of UK newspaper The Times today I was outraged to see the headline "Babies at risk from MMR jab timebomb".  After all the work that has been done to promote real science's findings about MMR, this headline sends exactly the wrong message.  It seems to be promoting the pseudo-science of the former-doctor Andrew Wakefield (who was struck off in 2010 for the damage that he has done to public health).

The Times seems to claim that babies are at risk from MMR

When you read the actual article it says the opposite.  This apparent timebomb is not a risk from the MMR vaccination, but the risk to the next generation because of the lack of vaccinations in children who are now approaching child bearing age over the next few years.

Teenagers are rightly being exhorted to get vaccinated - but the headline will have have caused much more damage as it will have been read on news-stands across the country by many more people than bother to read the content.

I deplore this behaviour from a newspaper which is said to be reputable.

Bad show, The Times!

Perspectives on the Cambrian Explosion

I must have been listening to too much pro-ID propaganda!  (I have!)  The proponents of Intelligent Design put up a superb, almost-convincing, smoke-screen and one of their favourite topics is 'The Cambrian Explosion' and that Darwin himself had recognised this as a problem.  They claim that the increased rate of evolution in that period of a few tens of millions of years, about half a billion years ago, shows evidence of the presence of an intelligent designer.  This seems to be based on a claim that information cannot be created except by intelligence.  More on that topic soon! 

Of course sometimes they take that trouble to pretend that this is not a religious claim!  Honestly it isn't.  You can believe everything they say, including this claim.

Reading the Wikipdia article about The Cambrian Explosion this evening, I was reminded that conventional science is by no means short of ways to explain the phenomenon, including:

• 'Large' animals of diverse types did exist before, and the evidence for them is growing steadily (in spite of the claims of ID's proponents)
• There are some special layers called lagerstätten, which preserved soft body parts unusually well, and several of these were in the Cambrian period
• Evolution was faster than 'normal' but not by more than a factor of ten or so, and there were other periods when 'explosions' happened, including the Devonian and Cretaceous
• A sudden increase in the amount of calcium in the oceans might have been significant for the innovative production of bony body parts
• The end of a previous ice age might also have mattered a lot.

All in all, the presence of an intelligent designer is not the only plausible explanation, and not even the most probable, for various reasons:

• How long did this particular intelligent designer live, as the Cambrian explosion lasted for tens of millions of years? 
• If it lived for that long, does that imply that it was God after all, or was it a family of shorter lived designers?
• If it was God, why was he so busy for that short period before leaving things to themselves for 500 million years?  Only after that time did he complete his perfect world, where he created original sin and all the other bad things.
• If it was God, how did he evolve anyway?  If you can't explain this then the problem has only been deferred, not solved.

Case for God not proven! I also note that I and D are the first two letters of an uncomplimentary five letter word.

Small note:  Obviously when Meyer's new book 'Darwin's Doubt' is released (at an exorbitant price from here, but only delivered within USA) we will learn the answers to all our doubts.  In the meantime we still have the opportunity to listen to the whining voice of Casey Luskin on the Discovery Institute's podcast ID The Future telling us that he has read it and that it explains everything beautifully.

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.

Should psychics be prosecuted?

If psychics offer their services to the police in order to solve a mystery or a crime and it all goes horribly wrong, which party should be considered culpable?

From time to time we hear about cases where psychics seem to offer that vital clue that police needed in order to solve a difficult case.  Correlation does not always imply causation of course, but facts like this do not often convince a gullible public who are left thinking that 'there must be something in it'.

One recent case where a psychic's total failure has been revealed was that of the investigation of the disappearance of kidnap victim Amanda Berry about 10 years ago.  With the final escape of Amanda we now discover for certain that the psychic Sylvia Browne had (at least) made a mistake.  Her claim that Amanda was no longer in the land of the living has now been shown to be complete fabrication.  I seem to remember that there was a similar case in Bristol UK, just last year, resulting in a false accusation of an innocent man.

Now I wouldn't like to suggest that this particular failed psychic is necessarily using her fame to interfere malevolently with police investigation.  It is quite possible that she truly believes in her abilities (not that she is just using a high profile case like this as a publicity stunt to bring the punters in to see her stage performances.)  I have a friend who also believes that she has these abilities even though she is a scientist.  She realises that the evidence is not yet compelling enough to convince me. 

However, the simple belief in one's abilities is one matter, but when interfering in matters that are truly a matter of life and death, actions should surely carry a degree of responsibility.

No doubt Sylvia Browne's stage work carries the disclaimer "For entertainment purposes only" in small writing, for legal reasons.  So I wonder why her work with the police should not be treated in the same way - also for legal reasons.  Should a prosecution be initiated for supposed psychics who waste police time in this way?  I speak in general terms - not necessarily in this specific case, but surely YES.

On the other hand, are the police failing in their duty by even considering that a psychic might be able to help?  In my view, the answer is an emphatic YES.  Disciplinary action should be taken against the officers who have failed in their duty to the public by even entertaining the idea that this might be useful.  Naturally it might have been a media propaganda stunt on their behalf too, but this sort of thing is at best a smoke screen to placate the credible public.

It is time to stop tolerating interference with the due process of law.

200W from The Earth

200 watts!  That is the amount of energy that the Earth/Sun system is emitting as gravitational energy as they orbit each other - according to Einstein's theories of relativity.

When I say they 'orbit each other' of course I meant that the Earth goes around the Sun and the Sun wobbles a bit.  (See more in the Wikipedia article about gravitational waves.)

You could run a few light bulbs on that much power, but that is all.

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 Baghdad Batteries

When do you think batteries were invented?  200 years ago or 2000?

I tend to believe in the former, but some claim that some Sumerian artifacts were used as batteries for gold plating of other artifacts, and that they were made about 250 BCE.

These are known as the Baghdad Batteries, or Parthian Batteries and you can see the Wikipedia article here.

I'm feeling skeptical!

This article seems to me to have a much better explanation of the findings.  Electricity then becomes a modern invention again.

Discovery Institute's latest 'divine comedy'

It is not unusual for The Discovery Institute's podcast, ID the Future to be filled with pseudo-scientific nonsense (in the style that I mentioned a couple of days ago).  I loyally listen to laugh and to learn the arguments that the  neo-Creationists like to use (and what creative pejorative terms they propagate to describe real scientists).  The latest episode doesn't feature the always-offended voice of Casey Luskin who is the regular host, but it takes the form of an audio adaptation of a short novel called I, Charles Darwin by Nickell John Romjue.  You can read more about it here.

Judging by what we have heard in the first episode (which you can find here) it will be surprising if many people actually bother to listen to the whole of it, unless like me they do it to giggle at it!

In this risible novel Darwin finds himself resurrected and returned to present day London, where he has a wallet filled (and constantly re-filled) with magical pound notes!  Yes, notes!  And these notes are not mentioned just once but several times, so it isn't an error.  See the comment at the end if this doesn't seem strange to you!

We get all the usual time-travel nonsense about how surprised Darwin is to see the way we dress and travel, mixed in with a load of pseudo-scientific propaganda.   We have been told that he can make himself visible and invisible at will.  He has the memories of his previous life plus the instructions that he received from whoever sent him back to earth.  Presumably this was 'the intelligent designer' herself, but of course her identity is still being kept secret from us - just as it is in real life.

The unlikely and illogical tale is wrapped in a literary style that must be aimed at a pre-teenager.  The prose makes the Harry Potter novels (which I greatly enjoyed) seem to be written in quite advanced English.

Why would the Discoveroids lower their standards to this level, I wonder.  It must be another feeble attempt to corrupt the minds of the young!

Can't wait for the next exciting episode!

Small note: Pound notes have not been in use for nearly two decades and you would not be able to spend them in today's Britain, whether magical or not.  Since 1984, our lowest denomination in paper currency is the £5 note.