Does an intelligent designer solve the ID problem?

Having been reading about the Cambrian Explosion which I mentioned recently, it might be a good time to contemplate the creation of information.

Can information be created without intelligent intervention?

Intelligent Design (ID) proponents claim that the existence of their 'intelligent designer' (who has no link with theology - honestly!) is implied by the diversity of new information created during the Cambrian Explosion.  Something intelligent must have interfered to make life blossom over that short period of 50 million years.  They can't think of any better explanations, so this has got to be the best one.  This idea comes from the Law of Conservation of Information.  That sounds scientific doesn't it, but as Wikipedia explains, it is not really a scientific law at all.  It is an invention of William Dembski, founded on a vaguely related topic by (real scientist)  Peter Medawar in his book The Limits of Science (1984).  Perhaps in the public mind it is also backed up by cherry-picked terminology from some very esoteric quantum mechanics.

Aside from the fact that their 'law' is just made up and that it is mathematically falsifiable, is their argument about information even reasonable?

To the first approximation, the answer has got to be NO!  Snowflakes have structure.  They happen to be created in a random sort of way but their crystal structure is certainly not free of information.  Similarly if you dissolve a lot of salt in hot water and then let the solution cool down, the salt will crystallise.  Surely this is information too - and it was definitely self-created.

Neither of those examples give information that is then read back and used to make a future action happen though, so in a sense they might not count.

Taking the opposite extreme, the creation of different forms of life, the question gets a little more complex.  Let's make the assumption - for the time being - that this new information did come from an intelligent designer in just the way that this blog post is new information created by me.  How did I develop the concept that I want to present, formulate it and publish it?

Obviously some measure of intelligence might have been involved for the latter two stages and I leave it to my intelligent readers to decide how much of it is demonstrated, but just invoking intelligence is not enough is it?  Aside from the fact that intelligence is a quantity that is notoriously hard to define and measure, intelligence in itself does not create new ideas.  Somewhere in the mind of a designer there has to be a 'spark' that starts off a thought process, leading to a train of thought.

Where does that spark itself come from?  Since I am not a dualist I cannot use my soul as an explanation of the source of inspiration.  Therefore I am left with the problem of finding an explanation for the information that has been conveyed by my own intelligence.

In other words, invoking an intelligent designer does not move us forward at all.  I think this condemns Intelligent Design to the realms of pseudo-science, if indeed it had not already managed to do that for itself in other ways.

Or perhaps the idea for this post came from the great Intelligent Designer in the sky?

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.

Full stops are rude?

I have been hearing some surprising small hints about the teen culture in text messaging.

Did you know that it is rude to finish your message with a full stop?  Apparently this is an indication that the conclusion is a somewhat  pointed remark.

And who would have guessed that a smiley face in the wrong context can be taken as a hint of sarcasm? :)

On asking how we are supposed to know these things, it was not very reassuring to be told "it doesn't matter for you because you are old".  Hmm . . . not all that old!  I don't yet know what I want to do when I grow up!

But apparently I am safe, so if you find me committing either of those offences please forgive my age!  I'll continue with my opinion that it is rude not to punctuate your sentences properly.

Dr Who to the rescue

I've been hearing rumours about how the world was saved from near certain annihilation earlier this week.

Stories are circulating on the internet about a mysterious character arriving in a police box with a charming female companion, and defeating the space Mayans.

And who said that Dr Who is fictional?

What else is in an Arabic name?

Following on from Saturday's post, Abu and Hamza - What's in a name, here is another interesting translation problem.

In Arabic names, both ibn and bin can be translated as "son of".

Osama bin Laden means "Osama, son of Laden." It's not uncommon for names to include references to three or four generations of ancestors, each offset with bin or ibn.

So, why do some names use bin while others use ibn?  The spelling of the word in Arabic changes depending on where it is in the sentence.  If it is at the beginning, it is written as alef-ba-nun, which we transliterate as 'ibn'. If the word appears in the middle of a name, the alef gets left off.  We write that as 'bin'.

Given this system, it's not entirely accurate to use "Bin Laden" when we refer to the man in shorthand. The Guardian's sentence "Bin Laden effusively praised the Jordanian-born militant." would more accurately be "Ibn Laden effusively praised the Jordanian-born militant" since in this case the "son of" is at the beginning of the name.

Bin and ibn are more likely to show up in places with strong connections to tribal culture, like Saudi Arabia. People who live in big cities tend to drop the connecting terms from their names—someone named Osama Bin Laden might end up just "Osama Laden." In North Africa, the bin tends to be spelt with an "e", as in the name of former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella.

England's Canals - Oxford

I'm seriously considering buying a boat to explore the rivers and canals of England.  Fortunately I have friends who share this interest.  On a short trip on the Oxford Canal yesterday this autumnal glory delighted me.

Reflections on the Oxford Canal

Apparently calm and tranquil thoughts should have been foremost in my mind as soon as I got on-board.  But when the owner of the boat jumped off to get the next lock ready, leaving me in charge, I reminded him that he hadn't shown me where the brakes were.

Fortunately, native wit and physics came to the rescue, (but I still haven't worked out how to reverse into a parking slot).

Redditing revealed - Iesvs the spoil-sport

In the last post I wrote about taking steps to help people to establish new blogs.  Something Surprising has now been running for a good while, with a new post every day, and with a dedicated band of regular followers whose comments and help I greatly appreciate.

One of the ways to help people to get traffic has always been to post their work to a link sharing site like Reddit, but it seems increasingly obvious that this is not worth the trouble.

It seems that /reddit/atheism, for example, is mostly followed by people who simply enjoy silly pictures or cartoons.  The evidence for this claim can be seen by visiting their site and looking at the links with the highest number of positive votes.  Almost none of them are worth the effort, and a few minutes of browsing is likely to make you feel quite cross.

On top of that, the moderators and admins seem to ban posts to Reddit for the strangest reasons.  It seems that it is bad form to post your own work for review by the rest of the Reddit community, even though (I believe) democracy was the original strategic aim of the site.  It is tempting to believe that many Reddit users are incapable of reading well reasoned articles by well established bloggers, and that although Reddit brings in a quantity of visits, it rarely brings in good quality readers who will join in the discussion.

Reddit has various cunning ways of blacklisting people and I wrote about this topic before in Why this might become a Reddit-free zone.  Finally, you will notice that the reddit boxes have all disappeared, from this blog.

The Reddit admins never have to give their reasons for their decisions and it is not overwhelmingly obvious that their actions are completely rational.  Even whole domains can banned for the most peculiar reasons, as you can read in this interesting article from Forbes.com, Reddit Reportedly Banning High-Quality Domains, exposing leaked information about reddit admins.

This domain has not yet been banned (at least at the time of writing), but frankly I won't surprised when they do ban Something Surprising for the opinions shared here.  This would be consistent, just as they banned my Reddit account for asking the following question of a redditor who has been particularly active at persecuting excellent free-thinking bloggers like Rosa Rubicondior.

So which part of this is the offence?  Is it the offence of putting the letters iesvs into a username?  I don't see why there's anything wrong with that unless you are an irrational self-centred idiot.  Or is it posting two items from the same blog?  Or is it that iesvs is a closet christian who doesn't like the views that Rosa expresses?  Or is it that /r/atheism really only likes silly pictures and not thoughtful posts?  And no I am not Rosa in another form.

Anyone even suspected of being a clone of Rosa gets immediately banned, and anyone who dares to include the characters 'iesvs' in their name gets the same treatment.

The only contributions to Reddit by a troll-like admin, Iesvs,
banning other users for no reason at all.

You might notice that the comment itself has been deleted from iesvs's post here where it says that there have been three comments but only two are visible.  Here's a screen shot just in case the evidence gets deleted.

Three comments?  But one is invisible.
So Iesvs has a great sense of humour and justice!

Besides that, if they specifically forbid people from posting their own work on the sub-reddits, why do they not simply say so and make a rule about it?

As you can see, the only contribution made by this 'iesvs' is to report other users to spammers, and since he can't cope with anyone taking the p**s I can only conclude that Iesvs is a megalomaniacal spoil-sport with no sense of humour.

The role of Pi in engineering

My Facebook friend Steve Zara posted a comment recently to say that

"My husband has worked out an effective formula for how long I will take for any software engineering task: I work out in some detail how long I think I will take, and he multiplies by 3. Never fails."

Steve and John have stumbled upon one of the great mysteries of the universe here, and he has clearly used appropriate rounding to come to this conclusion.

Having been involved in engineering, project management and costing for longer than I care to remember, I have used that trick regularly.  Even this week I found myself explaining my method of costing to an apprentice.  Although it seems slightly random and spurious to do this, a healthy dose of pragmatism has taught me to trust it, but only in the right circumstances.

For ordinary, 'low risk', projects and for purchases of bespoke items, I have always taken a few moments to consider how long it might take and how much the materials might cost, then added those values together and then . . .  multiplied by the well-known mathematical constant, Pi (or 3.14).

Some 'scholars' tell me that I am being unnecessarily pessimistic, and that instead I shouldn't use Pi.  They usually suggest the use of another universal mathematical constant, namely e (which has a value of 2.72).  However, this hardly matters, because being a pragmatic/engineering physics type person - I work to one decimal place and usually try to encourage the clever people around me to do the same.  I'm not always successful.

One trick that I use when presented with a 5 digit result from a complex engineering calculation is to challenge one of the first few digits.  e.g.  faced with a number like 5.6789, I might ask "Are you certain that the second digit is 6?" and when they look surprised I might back up the question by choosing one of the numbers that they used as the basis for their calculations and ask where they got it from.  (Something like - "What value have you used for the emissivity of stainless steel at that temperature?" might do it.)"  After that it is often sufficient to know that the answer is 'about 5 or 6', not 5.6789.  This is not as imprecise as you might think.  Knowing that it is 5, and not 0.5 or 50 is often very valuable.

This brings us back to the estimate of 3!  Perhaps now you can see that it is close enough, because the errors in everything else are bound to be bigger, and from experience, people are usually optimistic in their estimates - even if they know that people are usually optimistic.

Incidentally, for more risky projects this rule breaks down.  If the planned work is something that has never been done before, then I might go for a different factor such as Pi squared (or 10).  Once again, one can argue about the accuracy of this rounding to 10, but at a value of 9.87 it is much closer to 10 than you might have expected, and definitely more accurate than almost any of the assumptions that you might use in your estimates.

From experience, since many people shy away from risky technical projects it is often possible to get an order for something that appears to be blatantly over-priced.  However, from having managed projects like this sometimes in previous roles, I would say that the few cases where you beat the risk and make a killing barely cover the many cases where you encounter such great difficulties that you lose your shirt. That is why risky one-off projects sometimes seem expensive.

Of course none of this works in a mass-production environment.  I remember a story about the development of the Ford Fiesta (which was sometimes known as the Ford Fiasco in the early days).  I think the first car cost £500,000 to build.  (In the late 70s that was a lot of money!)  Then the first batch of 10 cost £40,000 each.  Ultimately the selling price of the vehicles came down to around £5000 or less, so it is clear that the build cost was lower.

The gorilla's genome says . . .

The full genome of the last of the great ape species has been sequenced at last, and the results have been the cause of great excitement among the 'Intelligent Design' community. The gorilla genome is about the 50th to be completed, and it turns out that it has taken quite a while, partly because it is a great deal larger than our own.

The surprise is the finding that about 15% of the genes of gorillas are shared with humans and a different 15% with chimpanzees.  On the face of it, ID's proponents would appear to have a good point when they claim that this calls the family tree of the great apes/hominids into question.   They claim (e.g. here if you can read the words of Casey Luskin without imagining his whining voice) that 'neo-Darwinian evolution' has now been shown to have failed - yet again!

Just a few observations about Luskin's technique before attempting any analysis of the science.  In only the second paragraph he had to launch into an 'ad hominem' attack on Eugenie Scott.  Given that his argument might have had some face-value scientific merit, I think I can be forgiven for finding this approach to be unnecessarily confrontational and defensive.  But evidently he thought that it strengthened his argument.  I don't agree but I'm interested (and proud) to see that Eugenie has got him on the run like that.

I am much more interested in his 'reasoning'.  He says:

"The standard evolutionary phylogeny of primates holds that humans and chimps are more closely related to one-another than to other great apes like gorillas. In practice, all that really means is that when we sequence human, chimp, and gorilla genes, human and chimp genes have a DNA sequence that is more similar to one-another's genes than to the gorilla's genes."

Indeed that is what we might have expected, but the fact that the data seem to show something different is interesting isn't it?  I would also have expected Luskin to 'muddy the waters' for a non-specialist audience by using words like 'phylogeny'.  Why use a small word when a big one can be used instead.

I like to hone my arguments by listening to this sort of rhetorical tosh and trying to spot the logical fallacies.  My first thought on the topic was that the process of speciation must have been slow enough to allow a degree of gene transfer between the sub-species that later divided into the current completely separate species. We know that Neanderthals interbred with our ancestors to some degree.

Indeed, it turns out that this has been offered as an argument, but being a relatively weak one, this was the one that Luskin proceeded to attack.

"Called incomplete lineage sorting, it provides a convenient after-the-fact explanation for why different genes carry different phylogenetic signals. Of course, this is merely an ad hoc hypothesis invoked to explain away inconvenient data which contradicts the standard phylogeny."

That sounds reasonable until you discover that 'incomplete lineage sorting' is not quite what he describes.  Fortunately, proper specialists in genetics have come to the rescue.

In his slightly technical but manageable post Chimps are our closest relatives… but not for all of our genes, David Winter describes much more clearly how different variants of genes (called alleles) can be spread exactly as has been observed.  It turns out that it is perfectly understandable how the gene tree can be different from the species tree.

The gene tree can be different from the species tree. 
From an excellent article by David Winter

As David Winter says:

"For recent or repeated and rapid speciation processes there might not be time for the genetic lineages to sort. The gene tree can be different from the species tree"

and he then goes on to explain that this very observation can probably tell science something useful:

"Although we’ve always known this problem existed, we’ve only recently been able to extend population genetics theory to actually infer the history of species for gene trees even when those gene trees are unsorted."

So now you can decide for yourself who to side with - since we are 'teaching the controversy' as the ID community likes to say.  Do we believe a real geneticist who has a real explanation (or was it only an ad hoc hypothesis that we have always known about?).  Or do we believe someone who goes for ad hominem attacks on respectable and rational scientists, then uses 2 dimensional analogies that fail to prove anything because of their simplistic nature and merely rhetorical value?

I would still go for a strong adherence to the belief that chimps are our nearest cousins (speaking as a species of course).

ID might still be one of the strongest lines of evidence for the existence of a god, but let's face it, it doesn't have much competition!  Nor does it imply which of the current catalogue of 3000+ gods might have been responsible for the design, or why he did such a poor job of it.

Small note: Of course this very post could be said to be an 'ad hominem' attack but I trust you to judge that for yourself.

Christian Contrasts on Good Friday

You may be surprised to hear that this week I actually went into a church - more to the point into a Roman Catholic Cathedral.  I walked through the door thinking to myself that this world-wide institution is sometimes said to be 'one of the greatest forces for evil in the world'.  Whether that is true or not, it does at least exemplify some of the contrasts that are to be found everywhere in Christianity.  This is a topic that could hardly be addressed on a better day than Good Friday - when Christians around the world strangely conspire to celebrate the torture and death of their saviour.

The Cathedral in Madrid - only completed in 1994.

Obviously many Christians will complain that Catholics are 'the wrong kind of Christian' and that the Roman Catholic Church does not represent the views of all the other churches.  I accept that.  Roman Catholicism certainly stretches the whole Christ myth and all its trappings to a point very close to the ridiculous.  However, that is not to say that the other churches are free of quirks.  Just for now, lets take a look at the contrasts to be found in Catholicism.

Madrid Cathedral - beautiful decorations behind the altar.

The glorious church pictured in this post (and visited this week) is the rather recently completed cathedral in Madrid.  Like so many of the buildings in that beautiful city, it demonstrates some of the finest architectural qualities that Europe has to offer.  The splendid buildings all over the centre of the city show the kind of quality that many Italian cities can only attempt to replicate.  It is impossible to compare the cut stone of Madrid with the crumbling, plastered walls that attempt to hide the fact that many of the walls of the buildings in Naples are built of little more than rubble.

Few would deny that it is a magnificent building, brightly decorated in a style that suits the city well. The quality of the gold-leaf decorations can hardly be questioned.  The whole building exudes a feeling of quality.

But did you notice something else?  A forlorn figure, barely visible in the foreground, silhouetted against the obvious opulence?

The Crucifixion - a forlorn figure silhouetted against opulence.

Here we come to that great Catholic paradox, common to all the basilicas and cathedrals around the world, and probably at its worst in The Vatican itself.  Somehow they have to 'sell' the contrast between obvious affluence and the abject suffering of the limp body nailed to a cross, in some kind of ritualistic, bronze-age, scape-goat death.  On its own this is disgusting enough.  As Christopher Hitchens said, "What ill is crucifixion a cure for?"

The Roman Catholic Church takes this concept of a good kind of suffering to an extreme, and of course for them it is the cure for something called 'original sin'.  At least most protestant churches have to decency to spare their congregations from the gruesome details of crucifixion.

One other feature of Catholic churches around Europe also intrigues me. 

At every door or gate you can find someone begging for money.  There is never a crowd, but just enough of the professional poor to promote a good sense of moral blackmail in passers-by. 

I ask myself how this tradition is 'policed'.  Is it self-controlled by the people who make a profession of seeming so poor, at least in comparison to the riches of the building that they are 'guarding'? Perhaps they know that one or two of them might collect enough money, whereas too many would collect much less and have to split it between more of them.  Perhaps they take it in turns.  Or is is controlled by the church itself?  Is there a roster?  Are the people charged a license fee for use of prime real estate?  I wouldn't put this past the machinations of a world-wide racket which makes a living out of the suffering of the poor.  Do any of you know the answer?

I don't mean to mock the poor, but I do mean to mock the contrasts.  How can the clergy fail to be embarrassed by their own church?

Small note:  I haven't even touched on the other, more newsworthy, sins of The Church!

Highly visible

Working for a large organisation, rules are sometimes applied in strange and inconsistent ways.  After an unfortunate road accident on-site, in which a pedestrian's leg was broken, one of our partner organisations introduced a rule that their employees must wear high visibility jackets whenever they are outdoors.

Maybe this is sensible, maybe not, but fortunately that rule has not been rolled out to the rest of us.

Wouldn't it have been rather ironic to have to wear a high visibility vest on top of the smart black 'low-visibility' jacket that was issued last year?  Strangely though, it is exactly the sort of thing that I could easily imagine happening.

On a 'partner site' a few years ago a rule was introduced to stipulate that all cyclists must wear cycle helmets.  That is not required on the public roads in UK, and there are statistics from other countries that have implemented such a law to suggest that accidents might even increase.  On that particular site there are also outdoor areas where it is mandatory to wear a hard hat.

I speculated to one of the directors that I might find it difficult to decide what to do if I had to cycle through a hard hat area.

It seems that that very argument had already been rehearsed for real.

Such is the fun of working for the government!

The glass is half full . . .

Apparently the glass is half full according to an optimist, but the glass is half empty to a pessimist.

Glass completely full.  (Image ethically sourced from here.)

Some actually regard this a a serious philosophical question, but to me it  represents a logical fallacy that I can't exactly name.  It is something like the fallacy of the missing middle, but not exactly the same.  There are other ways to look at the problem.

To one engineer it might be said that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

To another engineer, the glass is completely full but only half-filled with liquid.  The other half is filled with air.

As for me - I always thought from a pragmatic point of view that the glass is half-full if you are filling it and half-empty when you are drinking from it.

Another view that someone passed to me recently was that while we've spent all that time arguing about the glass, someone swiped it and drank the contents.  Now the answer is a bit easier . . . and its your round!

Is this a question?

There is a story as old as the hills about a question that might have been set in a finals exam for a degree in Philosophy at Oxford University (once upon a time).

The question was :

"Is this a question?"

You can imagine the convolutions that under-graduate philosophers might get into.  For three years they have been trained to think tangled thoughts and to back up their reasoning with seemingly logical arguments.

With so much at stake, how brave would you have to be to write as little as:

"Yes, if and only if this is an answer"

Small note:  The myth says that the candidate was rewarded with a first class honours degree!

Robert Hooke's authentic wig

In yesterday's news, it was reported that a new portrait of the eminent physicist Robert Hooke FRS was to be unveiled in London's Institute of Physics.

What, you might ask, is unusual about this?  Surely famous physicists - and there really have been some famous physicists - are commemorated in this way all the time aren't they? 

Hooke was one of the greatest experimentalists of the 1600s and was described as "England's Leonardo" and "the greatest mechanic of his age" in an era where the word mechanic was a mark of the greatest possible respect.

In spite of all that, only one portrait of him was produced during his life time.  Even that one was destroyed by fire, in an incident that has often been attributed to the misdeeds of his rival, Isaac Newton.  This means that we have literally no record of his appearance at all, except descriptions in words.  And how easy is it to describe a face in words that convey the facts accurately?  I suggest that it is virtually impossible.

None of this seems to have deterred a commission from the Institute of Physics to paint a portrait.  The inability to guarantee that the portrait's appearance resembles him in any way has not prevented artist, Rita Greer from accepting the task.  However I suppose that there is one feature of this montrous image that might have been authentic.  At least the wig looks as though he might have chosen it at some point in his illustrious carreer.

I'm glad I am no longer a member of the IOP.  What a waste of money that could have been used for something useful - like physics! 

New Year Numerology

I never could get the point of celebrating New Year, and this year is no different.

Apart from the fact that the household was disturbed by fireworks as late as 02:30 and that the phone rang a couple of times, we woke this morning to find the drains blocked by some kind and generous neighbour pouring liquid fat down their sink.  (You guessed it - it didn't remain liquid for long!)

The New Year seems to be no better than the old.

However, why does nobody ever notice that the timing of New Year is only the result of something akin to numerology?  Someone, sometime, decided that the clocks should say the time that they do.  The whole system is based on the happenstance that the zero meridian passes through the royal Greenwich Observatory at Greenwich.  Had the Rose Line in Paris been successfully deployed instead, the moment of celebration would be a few minutes earlier, (or indeed nearly an hour later due to the artificial and ridiculous one hour time difference between Paris and London).  If we chose the meridian on the basis of the 'centre of mass' of the world's population then it would sure be somewhere else.

Why not choose the meridian that passes through Mecca?  Many Muslims claim that it has a special place on the surface of the earth, involving the golden ratio in the distance from Mecca to the north and south poles and some other numerologocial nonsense.  (Their claims relating to longitude are not on such firm footing but hey - why not choose to use someone else's numerology when it turns out to suit your argument!  See the note at the end of this post for a link.)

As good skeptics, I feel that it is our duty to question the arbitrary choice of time and to celebrate whenever it suits us, instead of following the herd and doing what everyone else does.

After all, it was only from 1753 that New Year was deemed to take place on 1st January.  For centuries before that, in England at least, New Year was 'celebrated' on 'Lady Day', 25th March.


Let's just say that I understand the need for an excuse to have a party sometimes, and at least the fuss that surrounds New Year is little less annoying than the fuss surrounding the choice of 25th December as the birthday for the mythical baby Jesus.

I'm just glad that all the fuss is over for another year.  I only have to tolerate a few days of being greeted with a cheery 'Happy New Year' and then we can go back to celebrating a happy New Day every morning in the normal way.



++ If you want a good chuckle about numerology, follow this perfectly serious link to a Youtube video about the Golden Ratio and the place of Mecca.  The surprising thing is that the claims about the latitude of Mecca are quite (but not exactly) accurate. 


Small note: This is published deliberately at a moment that is not dead on New Year.  It might have been, if another arbitrary time system had been chosen.  Happy Alternative New Year!

Restrictive licensing laws!

I didn't like to choose a title that described this photo in detail.  It might have lead the authorities to suspect that I do not treat my children kindly.

This was seen in a bar next to the River Thames in Oxfordshire and it made me smile while waiting to be served.  Licensing laws in UK have been relaxed to some extent in recent years, so I think this sign might be a bit out of date.

Headington shark reaches 25 years

In the suburbs of Oxford (UK), far from the sea, there is a bizarre and eccentric sight.  This year it reaches its 25th anniversary.

It isn't a photoshop creation!  This thing is real and I have often enjoyed the sight myself as I have passed the end of the road.  Obviously some of the neighbours objected at the time and the series of appeals for planning permission reached the Home Secretary, Michael Hesseltine.

Small update (29th Oct):  This started off as an interesting anecdote, but the comments have developed into an interesting discussion about atheism, so I have added the Atheism tag!

Dr Who on the Thames

Boats designed for the English canals are not called barges (as used in common parlance) but 'narrow boats'.  Some canal locks can accept boats up to 70 feet long, but others are more restrictive.

This 'narrow boat', moored on the River Thames is also a short boat.  No, that is not a technical term but merely a description.  I feel that it could probably navigate almost any waterway.

The humorous name suggests that it is bigger inside than it is outside!

Feynman on 'honours'

Not everyone likes Richard Feynman's style, but I came across this today and found myself empathising with it.  He was taught by his father to have 'disrespect for the respectable'.  That sounds like one of my late father-in-law's Methodist sermons.

I suppose it could be a sign that my inner anarchist is very active this week, largely provoked by nonsense and bureaucracy at work.

Incidentally - if you follow that video link to Youtube you can  see parts 1 and 3 of the series.  All of them are great.  This one just resonated with me today.

Blasphemy Day

Apparently it is blasphemy day.  Haven't I been well behaved?

I will just give you a link to a blog about the 'legalisation' of blasphemy within the United Nations.

UN legalises blasphemy as protected speech  from the Science and Atheism blog.


"Prohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion or other belief system, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with the Covenant  . . ."  Read on

Incidentally - if you feel up to it you can find the whole document at this location.