Bee wearing

The Chinese bee wearing championship has just taken place as you can see on the BBC news web site.

The trick is to 'wear' as many bees as possible, with only a pair of shorts as protection.  Apparently the world record is 39.5 kg.  That must be tiring.  I wonder what you do if you feel the need to take the weight off your feet while wearing the bees.  Presumably they do not like to be sat on, and would show their 'appreciation' in the customary way.

Swimming on Mars

Getting over the demise of the space shuttle and American manned space flight, this video from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows liquid flowing on the surface of the red planet.  Measurements of the temperature in the region shown in these images suggests that the flowing liquid will be water - probably salty water.



Obviously this raises questions about the possibility of life on another planet again.  Life is found everywhere on earth but so far nowhere else in the universe.  There are strong contenders for the possibility of life on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn where it seems likely that there are oceans of liquid water under thick layers of surface ice.  However, Mars is more like a smaller sister of the earth and it is a lot closer.  These water flows would seem to be a great place to start to look for life.

What would be the implications of finding life on Mars?  It is interesting to speculate how it would affect the views of religious people.  I suspect that very few would have their faith rocked by the revelation that the earth is not unique after all and that life has been formed elsewhere.  No doubt some would claim that their god put it there, although it is not obvious why he would bother to do that if the universe was created for man.

Consider a couple of other options.    Imagine if we found life on Mars and found that it had something like DNA in its cells.  If this DNA was totally different to that found in all living organisms on earth then we would have some great data about the likelihood of abiogenesis in any place where the ingredients of life were available.

On the other hand if we found that the martian life forms shared some features of their DNA with terran life that would be fascinating too.  That might support the hypothesis of panspermia.  Life might have been seeded on earth from a passing comet, and if that has happened then perhaps it has been seeded on other bodies in the solar system.  In many ways I think this would be the more interesting possibility even though it might not inform us so much about the chance of life in other solar systems.

All we need now is a new mission to Mars to search for life.  A manned mission would be best because humans are so much quicker at gathering information than robots.  (I have heard that we might be a factor of 10,000 better at it.)  But in these times of austerity I fear that there is little prospect of that.

It will be a little while before anyone gets chance to swim in the waters of Mars.  Never mind - the water would be pretty chilly anyway!

Multiverse agnostic

I read on a forum somewhere - it is not important where - a christian argument that they seemed to consider to be proof that atheism is wrong.  The basis of the discussion was the Discovery Channel programme featuring Stephen Hawking who uses cosmological arguments against the existence of god(s).  The argument against Hawking was somewhat rambling, but the only new approach that I spotted among the tired 'evidences' was the following:

Now, let us assume that the multiverse exists and that, presumably, our universe originates as one of many in this multiverse. One cannot prove the multiverse exists, is that correct? Likewise, one cannot prove that God exists.

So if it is proper for atheists to believe that a multiverse exists, then it is proper for others to believe that God exists.

Fine - believe whatever you like.  But it all falls down if you are agnostic about the possibility of there being multiverses out there (or in here, or wherever such multiverses might be found).  As far as I can tell there is no way that the multiverse hypothesis will be proven in my lifetime or indeed in yours and I honestly don't even find if very exciting to speculate about it.  The cosmology of what we can see is fascinating to me, but beyond that the speculation and mathematical beauty leaves me cold.

The odd thing is that I don't feel a need to explain how the universe came into being.  The fact that it could exist seems increasingly to be understood by physics, For example, it seems that there is a net energy of zero in the universe, and so in a sense nothing has been created from nothing.

The fact that it seems to be fine tuned is also not very interesting.  It just is.  If it wasn't then we wouldn't be speculating about the topic.

However, the situation is not helped in any way by invoking a supernatural figure to explain creation.  If such a figure existed, how would you explain his existence?  How was he created?

Richard's Reactor

A Swedish man who wanted to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen has been arrested and all his radioactive stuff has been confiscated.

The amazing thing is that he was blogging about his intention to build a reactor to split atoms at home.  Fortunately he has had to cancel his project now, but perhaps he has already contaminated his environment with radioactive materials.

This was of course a fission reactor - the 'normal' kind of nuclear reactor.  Had he instead built a fusion device he would have avoided all this trouble with the authorities, as you can see on a web site about a project to build a fusion machine in a domestic environment.  (At this scale it would not only do no harm, it would also do no good, but its a lovely hobby!) 

You might find this story surprising, but you might also be interested to know that the very first nuclear (fission) reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was built, not in a kitchen, but in a squash court.  (There is an urban myth that due to a translation error, Russian reports of this device placed it in a pumpkin field instead.) Read more about Enrico Fermi's work here.

It seems that nobody noticed Richard's blog, or at least nobody in authority took it seriously!  This brings one ray of hope to us bloggers.  Perhaps the authorities are not reading all our blogs looking for reasons to arrest us for stirring up unrest in the world after all.  Big brother must have been snoozing.

Wallabies on opium make crop circles!

Further to recent posts about crop circles in England (see below), it seems that in Tasmania they have a similar problem of crop vandalism!

This time the crop is not the traditional wheat or barley, and the vandals are neither human nor alien.  This story is about wallabies that get into fields of poppies that are grown for medicine production.  The animals graze on the poppies, get totally stoned on them, and roll around making circles in the fields.

I can't find any photos of the 'formations' that the wallabies produce but if anyone knows of one it would be great if you could post a link a comment below.  (Comments are easy - and always welcome!)

Thanks to @spiderlin for the link!

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art 

Another link to the story from a source other than the BBC can be found here.

Lightning explained?

@pruthvii1991 asked on Twitter what exactly is happening in the video embedded on the 15th May post, 'Lightning strikes'.  I'm always happy to get questions and to try to give an answer.  Of course the physics of lightning is still being explored, but here is an entry level explanation.

In brief, lightning strikes are not a single electric arc but a series of discharges in a fraction of a second. (Hence the flickering that you perceive.)  Initially the cloud and the ground send out streamers or fingers which are 'searching' for the best route to a place of the opposite charge.  These tentative fingers of lightning are caused by a large voltage gradient from the clouds to the ground.  You might not see them with the naked eye but in the plane video they were visible.  Sometimes they find nothing and retreat.  You can actually see these streamers in almost every photo you ever see of 'forked lightning' (as in images at this site which has 15 fantastic lightning photos).

As you can see in this photo from another source (see below), the fainter forks are the ones that failed to connect, and they quickly cool.  However, once a  tentative connection is made, the heated and ionised air becomes a good electrical conductor a huge current flows through one (or sometimes a few) paths.  The current heats the air to incandescent white which you see as the lightning strike.

A large flying electrical conductor like a plane can find itself as part of the route and might complete the connection from cloud to cloud or cloud to ground.  In the case of the featured video, the plane appears to have been in both routes.  The electrical current flows harmlessly through the metal skin of the plane and everything inside is safe because the skin is so good at conducting electricity.  The plane acts as a 'Faraday cage'.

When you hear thunder it is the result of the sudden heating and cooling of the air.  As the air is heated it expands rapidly, and as soon as the current in the lightning bolt stops, the air cools and collapses back to where it came from.  The resulting shock wave (which we perceive as sound) is the thunder clap.

If you have ever been close to a lightning strike (say less than 100m away) the sound is almost unbelievable and it seems to happen at the same time as the lightning flash!  If you are further away you see the lightning first and then hear the sound later.  For every kilometre between you and the lightning there is a delay of about 3 seconds because light travels so much faster than sound.

Finally - just for fun - see a page of 20 surprising 'facts' about lightning at this link.

Make the punishment fit the crime

I hope I never find myself in front of District Judge Daphne Wickham of the City of Westminster Magistrates Court.  Well of course I hope not to be in a magistrates court at all, but one can only hope that other judges are seen to be administering 'British justice' in a way that fits better with the desires of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado.

In their delightful comic opera, the star sang:

A more humane Mikado never
Did in Japan exist,
To nobody second,
I'm certainly reckoned
A true philanthropist.
It is my very humane endeavour
To make, to some extent,
Each evil liver
A running river
Of harmless merriment.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment! . . .



Let's examine the philanthropy in today's judgement in the case of Jonnie Marbles, (@JonnieMarbLes on Twitter), who nearly succeeded last week in putting a shaving foam 'pie' in the face of the 'innocent' Rupert Murdoch.   Of course Marbles was going to have some sort of punishment.

A few hours of community service would not have been surprising, perhaps with a short suspended sentence.  Some may argue that his service to the community began when he started to plan to attack Murdoch, and that the time he spent in custody should count towards it.  Murdoch is after all a man who is effectively above the law.  But no - three weeks in prison was the sentence.  And this judge is so arrogant and so determined to defend the 'establishment' that she was not prepared to offer bail pending an appeal, just in case another judge made the sentence more lenient. 

By comparison, Murdoch's wife (in her pink jacket) can be seen physically assaulting Marbles in the video of the event.  Her attack was unwarranted and viscious.  After all, policemen are paid to do that!  It is well established that they don't need help from by-standers.  When will she be in court for this assault?  Never.  Why not?

She clearly demonstrated her love for her husband('s money).

And what of other cases where Daphne Wickham has presided?  Well this is where I start to feel completely outraged.

Question 1:  If you push someone through a plate glass window, someone with his hands in his pockets who is not threat to anyone, how many weeks would you expect in prison?
Answer:  None . . . as long as you are a police officer and Daphne Wickham is the judge and the victim is black and obviously the sort of person who deserves to be stopped an searched in today's London.
(This was the 2010 case of Onyeka Obi who was stopped in London by PC Marcus Ballard, as he was on his way home from a birthday celebration.)

Question 2:  How many weeks in jail for bludgeoning a young lady with a truncheon because she is shouting at you?
Answer: None . . . as long as you are a 'highly trained and experienced officer' who in spite of having 7 seconds to weigh up the situation "mistook a carton of orange juice and a camera in Ms Fisher's hands as weapons when she approached from his 'blind-side' " . . . and as long as Daphne Wickham is the judge.
(This was the 2009 case of animal rights activist Nicola Fisher outside the Bank of England.  When we are driving we habitually make life-and-death decisions in 1 second or less, even though we are not (apparently) as well trained!)

Of course these two newspaper reports might or might not be accurate, but since neither comes from the stable of Murdoch's 'News International' it is always possible that they are true.

I'm just outraged by the disproportionate nature of British justice!  Surely the punishment has got to fit the crime, not the whim of a woman who's position of privilege and power seems to have inoculated her against real life.

The stars died for you

People brought up in a christian culture are taught from an early age that 'Jesus died for you'.  Omnipotent god apparently couldn't think of a better way to take away your 'sins' than to send himself to earth to be tortured and killed - to exist as a scape goat.  This was after he first introduced the idea of sin in the first two humans that we are supposed to believe he put on earth.

So forget Jesus and the bronze age myth of the scape goat and bring yourself to the scientific age when we are able to understand a lot about creation without invoking the supernatural.  You are fortunate to live in one of the first generations who can hope to understand the mysteries of existence with new insight.  Think for yourself about what did have to have to die in order for you to live.

The amazing fact is that as Carl Sagan said, "The earth and every living thing are made of star-stuff".  The elements that make up our bodies did not exist at the beginning of time, when hydrogen was the only matter around.  The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones and the carbon who's unique chemical properties give rise the elaborate chemistry of life were forged in stars that lived and died long ago. 

In stars hydrogen atoms are forced together so strongly and at such high temperatures that they fuse together to make helium.  Then the helium fuses with hydrogen and with itself to make progressively heavier elements, lithium, beryllium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen . . .  Heavier and heavier elements are created, and some of them become more abundant than others due the presence of 'islands of stability' - mathematically magical combinations of neutrons and protons to make the nuclei of stable elements.

This process of nuclear fusion continues through the life of a star, and at the end of that life the star explodes and its dust is scattered.  Given time, the interstellar wreckage of the first brightly burning stars was attracted back together into new stars, re-stocked with the hydrogen that makes them burn so brightly but containing the heavier elements that were the 'ash' of the previous generation.

Since the beginning of the universe there has already been time for several generations of stars, and most of the matter in your body must have existed in two or three suns before it came together to create our current solar system.  As our own local cloud of star dust condensed again most of the matter went into the sun itself, but a small proportion was moving at the right speed to resist the gravitational pull of our star and instead it coalesced into a rotating disk of dust, gradually forming the planets that we know today.

How the chemistry of the primordial soup turned into the chemistry of life is still a mystery to us.  Maybe science will understand the mechanism sooner or later, but already there are solid ideas about it.  The fact that these ideas are derided by creationists does not mean that they are not true.  The only 'evidences' that the creationists can offer are the 'argument from ignorance' and the idea of irreducible complexity.  Just because they personally can't believe that the universe came to be as it is today due to strict adherence to physical laws does not lend any support to the way they invoke a supernatural creator instead.

We are in fact the first generation of humans to know for certain that our solar system is not a unique accident, and indeed can now be quite sure that it was not created just for us by a creator god.  We can at last recognise that is in fact a circular argument to invoke such a being as a creator because it is the only way that you can explain the complexity of life .  Such a creator would have to be more complex than his creation.  If so, how was the creator created?  It is no use claiming that he was 'always there' for all time, because we now know that time itself wasn't there before the beginning of the universe as we know it.

What does that mean?  How could there be 'no time' before the beginning of time?  Well - think of it this way.  You have no problem with the notion that there is nothing to the north of the north pole do you?  So why is time any different?
Time itself began at the big bang.

However you consider it, we are only able to consider these exciting ideas because the stars died.  It is not that they 'died for you' like Jesus (didn't).  They were indifferent to you and me.  But if they had not died, we would not be living.

Where has all the quicksand gone?

When I was growing up - not all that long ago - the adventure movies that I saw often featured something that is now becoming rather rare.  Quicksand.

How often have you seen (older) movies where the hero or heroin is running through the jungle and they suddenly find themselves stuck in quicksand.  Initially they are only up to their waists, but everyone knows that escape is impossible.  The more you struggle, the more futile it is and the deeper you sink.  Resistance is futile!

In many ways that scenario is an ideal way to build suspense.  Of course at the last minute the hapless victim was always rescued by someone who improvised an implausible solution to the problem.  Obviously the following advice was not known to them at the time:

Don't struggle. Since the human body is half as dense as quicksand, you won't sink much below your knees, or to your waist under rare circumstances. Fighting the suction-like pull can be exhausting and can cause you to sink deeper by making the solution more fluid. To extract yourself, stay calm and lean backwards to spread out your weight while backstroking to firmer ground. Kick your legs slowly to loosen the surrounding sand, and move deliberately toward the edge. 

That sounds easy doesn't it?  I feel that today's generation of teenagers are deprived of this phenomenon and this opportunity to learn.

Perhaps it is something to do with global warming?

Historicity of Goldilocks

This lovely satirical post by @shanemuk came to my attention recently, and it fits nicely with a few of my own recent posts, but brings a little more humour than I was able to muster.

On the Historicity of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

"Since the advent of trendy theology in the 19th century, it has become fashionable to regard the Goldilocks narrative as just a story - that it didn't really happen. Nowadays many Christians even dismiss it as a myth, yet they still call themselves Christians. This is an appalling state of affairs, and it is even more tragic that few of the major Christian apologists have tackled this issue head-on. It is time to set the record straight, and affirm the historical Truth of the Goldilocks narrative. I intend to show that it is overwhelmingly more likely that the Goldilocks story is literally true than not, and not only does it constitute Warranted True Belief, it is *necessarily* true in a deep ontological and cosmological sense . . . "  Read On

This came from a blog called Answers in Genes - a nice play on words when compared with Ken Ham's disingenuous and scientifically inaccurate creationist site Answers in Genesis.


Related posts:

• Historical Jesus?
• Horus and Jesus 
• Mithra and Jesus  
• Krishna and Jesus
• Not even a new myth!

Identity crisis on Google+

Who am I - really?  That is a question that must be in the mind of a lot of people who have been considering using the new 'Google+' but are being put off by stories of account suspensions.  If you haven't heard the stories, try this link, Google+ and pseudonymity: An open letter to Google, for one of the more prominent stories of the week.  It details how a (quite well-known) online personality has had her account suspended by Google because GrrlScientist is apparently not her real name.  Even though it is a pseudonym that she has used for many years, it is deemed unacceptable by Google.

Google+ is clearly aiming to be a direct competitor to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook needs one!  How often does FB 'helpfully' change features that we have started to think we understand.  FB doesn't have a great reputation when it comes to privacy either.  The default option seems to be to tell everyone everything.  Well I exaggerate a little, but I was amazed when I started using FB (just this year) that I had to spend so much time locking down information that I didn't want to be known to everyone in the world.  (And I was already cautious about what information I had added to it!)

There is a raft of reasons why people use pseudonyms on-line.  I can only give my own reasons here.  I masquerade here on Blogspot as Plasma Engineer, use the same name on RD.net, plasma.engineer on gmail, and use @plasma_engineer on twitter.  I use another name for a work-related technical web site that I have been running for some years.  I even have a completely anonymous-looking hotmail account to use on sites that I suspect will send me a load of spam.  However I still use the name that my parents have given me on Facebook.  A few of you know all of these names, but I trust that other readers are not offended that I keep these identities separate.  I am not upset if I don't know your personal details, but I always feel honoured if you reveal them to me.  It is not just a matter of trust, it is just that we all have degrees of friendship in our real lives, and the same happens in the online communities that we frequent.

As a professional person, I believe that it is important that my personal opinions are separated from my professional opinions.  I don't kid myself that I am so important that it really matters on the grand scheme of things, but I have a role which requires me to act with authority sometimes.  I don't want my personal views on other topics to affect that role.

Having a pseudonym online means that I can exercise my right to free speech with a little more freedom than I would under my own name.  It is not that I feel concerned from a legal perspective.  After all, Google knows perfectly well who Plasma Engineer really is and the authorities could track me down in an instant, although I do not have an I-phone!  Even if I hadn't associated Plasma's e-mail account with my personal account they could easily enough spot that I typically log in from the same few IP addresses and MAC addresses and associate them.  Before you complain that Google would not do such a thing, remember the saga of the 'accidental' logging of wireless network SSIDs, IP addresses and other information while they were conducting the photographic survey of UK for Google maps.

Let's face it.  Google knows everything about us, like it or not.  It is part of the cost of an online presence.  I like to think of it as a responsibility check in some ways.  I'm not completely comfortable that Google knows so much but it does and its too late to change that.

Identity fraud is another area of concern for all of us.  We are constantly warned about it and still we hear stories about how identities and cash are stolen from the wary and the unwary alike.

On top of that, to be perfectly honest I'm literally scared of some factions.  I tend to speak out about things that concern me and some of those things are a matter of life and death to their proponents.  Indeed the life and death matters are the ones that I feel we should all know more about - if we have no warning we can't take any action to prevent things happening.  As an recovering christian, I tend to attack Christianity's inconsistencies sometimes.  There are probably fundamentalist christians who would wish me harm.  I also point out the dangers of creeping Islam, and I am certain that there are fundamentalist muslims who would actually wish me dead, and I have had thinly-veiled threats via Twitter - generally from ignorant idiots who seem to have no notion of rationality, truth or human rights.

So, is Google right to implement a rule about the use of real names on Google+.  I really don't know.  I can see why they want to avoid online fraud from accounts based on their servers. My G+ account actually is in my real name.  So is my Facebook account, and the Something Surprising Facebook

One thing I would have liked from Google was a warning when I set up my G+ account.  If they had made it perfectly clear that our accounts had to be in our real legal names rather than with a pseudonym then I would have felt that they had good reason to close some that were not - whether we like it or not.  Just saying to those who have lost their entire Google 'lives' (however temporarily) that it is against the terms of service (TOS) of the Google account is rather lame.  I have re-read the TOS again and find it hard to work out which clause they are invoking anyway.

The reason I think this is lame is a matter of consistency.   Google's fantastic and free blogging service does not seem to apply the same rules - not yet at least!

Of all the blogs that I follow - not many, but surely a representative number - I think only 10% are published under legally recognisable names.  My main concern about Google is that this identity crisis might get extended to Blogspot.  I have put a lot of effort into this blog this year, and loved doing it.  I now have a reasonable following of intelligent readers too.  Will Something Surprising get closed summarily because I would not answer to the name Plasma Engineer in the street, even though I really am an engineer (of sorts) who works with plasma?  If so, Google will save a LOT of server space as most of our blogs will vanish overnight without warning.

I would find that sad.

(Time for a backup I think!)

Later edition:
Reading further, I think the aim of Google's campaign against pseudonyms is to avoid the launch of a lot of 'corporate accounts' for every company, band and blog.  This link is to an article that Google+ Witnesses Traffic Growth Decline.  Funnily enough it neglects to emphasise that subscription is still by invitation only.

Laws of Thermodynamics

For those of you who found physics a struggle, here is a humorous (pessimistic-sounding) interpretation of the three laws of thermodynamics.

First Law:  You can't win, you can only break even.

Second Law:  You can only break even at absolute zero (the lowest temperature conceivable, minus 273.14 degrees celsius, or zero kelvin)

Third Law: You can't get to absolute zero (and indeed personally I wouldn't want to anyway).

So all appears to be lost!  But most of the physicists I know are surprisingly cheerful about it.

Flanders and Swann were pretty cheerful about it too.  (They were an entertaining duo who worked together from the 1960s.)  I defy you to keep a straight face as you listen to this.  (The pictures seem rather bizzare, but you don't need to look at them!)



I haven't mentioned the zeroth law.  Yes, there really is one!  Although it was discovered last, it was considered to be the most important basis for the others.

Rapture Index - quick update

You might remember my post on the Rapture Index. 

Well - it has now stabilised at a score of 182, just 2 below its peak value.

Scary!

Crop formations in trees?

For a few years I have heard rumours that 'crop formations must be caused by aliens because they have been found in trees' (in Canada I think).  Yes - apparently the appearance of a vaguely similar pattern, in trees, half way round the world makes complete sense of the patterns found in fields of wheat in southern England.

Having had a few posts about crop formations recently, I did a google search to see whether I could find pictures of this phenomenon.  So here it is.  A pattern that looks a bit like a crop formation, and it qualifies for inclusion on this blog because it certainly does look surprising.

I have no idea what the explanation for this is, but I would say the smart money is probably not on the alien hypothesis.

Source of this photo: Enormous tree-circles (like crop-circles) were discovered in the Wabikon lake forest (Wisconsin).  (I actually think it is a Photoshop job as the water in the furthest circle seems sloped.)  You can see this lake on Google maps too.  I couldn't spot any circles like this.  Can you?

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art

Japanese Rice Art

The crop circle formation might not have reached Japan, but instead there is a thriving meme for rice art.  Something about the water in the paddy fields lends itself to the production of striking high-contrast images like these.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Crop formations in trees? 
 

Where are the formations?

This site Crop Circles and More has a nice utility to show where the crop formations are appearing.  This was this year's map.  Who knows whether it is reliable and indeed how many have now been harvested.

This was the state of play as of yesterday evening.  All the formations in the world seem to be in England.  For some reason the 'aliens' seem to favour just two areas, with Wiltshire and the surrounding counties being highest on the list of places they like to visit.

I might go to see the two or three nearest to my house.  More news if they are still visible.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees?

Income from crop formations?

It is hard to argue that the making of crop formations is anything other than vandalism.  Some farmers have claimed that the damage caused by the vandals is not as bad as that caused by people visiting the land to see the formation from themselves.

A few circle makers make an income by accepting commissions to create adverts for products, but they are very much in the minority.  Clearly most of them do it for the sense of adventure and mischief, and they enjoy convincing the 'croppies' that the patterns are so complex that they can't be man-made.  (See Delusional Logic to work out which logical fallacy is invoked here!)

But some suggest that the farmers who are most innovative can cash in on a good formation, by charging people to go into their field to 'commune' with whatever they believe to be present.  Set up a booth and allocate an area as a car park and people will pay.  (Obviously not all people will pay, but those who are more nervous of being accused of trespass get the opportunity for a legitimate visit.)

There is a rumour of one farmer making a tidy £30,000 in this way.  This is much more than the value of the whole crop, let alone the small area damaged by the visitors.  It seems quite difficult to find out who this particular farmer might have been.

I wonder whether the tax man managed to find out!



Above picture and others came (ethically sourced) from this link.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees? 

Cornucopia for Cereologists

This is the time of year for a special harvest, mainly in the English speaking countries of the Northern hemisphere, and this year is no exception.  This is not the harvest of the crops that feed hungry mouths, but the deliberate wanton destruction of those crops in the name of art . . . and mischief.

I am talking of crop circles of course.  Or to use the 'proper' term they are not necessarily circles but 'formations'.  I am under no illusion whatsoever that it is aliens in UFOs who create and implement some of these brilliant designs.  They are expertly planned and usually implemented in secrecy by dedicated teams of pranksters.  Then they are lovingly studied and interpreted by 'cereologists' who seem not to have a skeptical bone in their bodies.

There are some common features throughout crop circle culture, apart from being most common in the English-speaking countries.  They only came to the attention of the public in the early 1980s - more on this in another post soon - but some would argue that this has been going on for centuries.  The only 'evidence' that cereologists can present for this claim is a single page wood-cut print about a 'mowing devil', in Hertfordshire, England, in 1678.  (Yes, that's how we spell that county in these enlightened times. We pronounce it Hart, not Hert. It seems to me that they got the spelling right in the 17th century.)

However, this is probably the first ever crop circle hoax.  For one thing, if it was a mowing devil it was cutting the crop.  In today's 'true' formations the stems of the crops are bent.  There are 'nodules' on the stalks which naturally allow the plant to bend, and as the crops are flattened the stalks are flexible enough to bend at these points.

As I often do, I am 'sitting on the fence' on the topic of crop formations, or as I prefer to say, I am presenting a balanced argument. While I feel sorry for the farmers who's crops are ruined I can't help admiring the art.  In another post soon I will look at the economic arguments for the 'industry'.

Understandably, most photos of these beautiful patterns carry a copyright warning, and not wishing to be eviscerated in court for infringing their rights, all the photos that I will use in the next few posts have been 'sourced ethically'. 

This spectacular formation appeared in 2001 in southern England.  It is sad that the ethical sourcing policy excludes some of the pictures from this year, but to be safe I have provided a link to a source for these.  Apparently cubes are in fashion in 2011.  I should warn you though that the word WOO is strongly associated with the second of the links below.

Some sites for some brilliant photos:
Free Natural Wallpaper - crop circles photos to download
Crop Circle Connector- large woo warning!  Lots of nice up-to-date photos though.


Related posts:
Out crop formation!
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees?

Out crop formation!

Isn't it surprising what appears in the crops these days!

This is the start of a series of posts about crop formations and cereology in 2011.  And yes, they are all hoaxes, just like this one.

Related posts:
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations 
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art  
Crop formations in trees?
Wallabies on opium make crop circles!

Texas evolves at last!

Who would have thought it?  The Texas Board for Education has finally voted on the 'controversial' topic of the teaching of evolution in high schools in the state.  The most surprising thing of all is that the vote was unanimously in favour of evolution.  Maybe that is evidence that evolution is taking place in Texas!

By 8 votes to none, they approved scientifically based supplements to biology text books and rejected supplements based on so-called 'intelligent design'.

Does this matter?  Why would anyone else care what they decide?

It matters because Texas is the state that has most influence over schooling in the whole of the USA.  Whatever gets approved in Texas tends to get adopted in the other states.

Anything that introduces the Fact of Evolution to millions of young people in US must be a good thing. 

Read more at Victory for evolution in Texas


Related posts:
Evolution video - Jack Szostak
Intelligent Falling
The myth of half-humans