Vifaa

Google and China

2010-04-01T09:02:00.001+01:00

Google has recently been involved in a rather public spat with the Chinese authorities. The Chinese government wanted to continue the arrangements whereby google.cn could operate in mainland China provided they blocked certain sites.

Google said (very understandably from their viewpoint) that censorship violated their principles and they would not co-operate. It is of course arguable that it is their football and they have a perfect right to choose whom they play with. I would myself risk jail and poverty to defend freedom of speech in my own country, but I do think that Google may have got it wrong in China for two reasons.

Firstly, I think Westerners should cut the Chinese authorities a great deal more slack. As I was starting secondary school, China was a closed society just emerging from the Great Leap Forward in which tens of millions had died. The authorities planned everything and brooked neither political dissent nor expression of religious belief. China's present leaders lived through that. You cannot move a thousand million people from Maoism to a liberal democracy overnight. The (still nominally communist) government has been opening its hands as fast as it dare for several decades; only last week, a friend sent me a link to an article in China Daily "House churches [read "not officially registered"] thrive in Beijing". That is a massive step forward. Massive.

Secondly, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the particular issue, this stinks of cultural imperialism. Even in the West, freedom of speech and expression is not absolute. We in the UK (quite rightly in my view) do not allow paedophile rings or terrorists unfettered right to express their views. We don't permit defamation, false claims of medical efficacy, or the publishing of material that breaches copyright. The key thing here though is that these limits are decided (however imperfectly) by society through it's government and not by some foreign firm. Imagine how we would feel if Google were Chinese owned and insisted on running its UK operation how it wanted. If I were a Chinese leader I would be thinking less about Tiananmen Square and more about precedent: for example, the freedom of action they they would have if (to take a hypothetical example) violent groups popped up in Tibet or amongst the Uyghur people and started using the Internet aggressively for recruiting.

The line between good and evil runs through every human heart, everyone makes mistakes, and we are all prisoners of our own background: Chinese leaders, Google executives – and even those who read and right blogs. Given empathy and the occasional touch of forgiveness the Chinese leadership will get there in the end. In the meantime I'd like to see Google showing a touch more respect for the largest sovereign nation on earth, even when they don't agree with them.

Assisted suicide – the thin end of a nasty wedge

2009-07-25T20:45:00.001+01:00

There is an ongoing propaganda war underway to make assisted suicide legal, despite the opposition of doctors.

The morality of suicide doesn’t bother me too much but I’m implacably opposed to the principle of assisted suicide for several reasons.

Firstly, whatever assurances are made and whatever safeguards are put in place, some older people will come under pressure to top themselves. For a few with particularly lazy, self-centred or callous children the pressure would come soon after a change in the law. Within a generation it would undoubtedly be widespread.

Secondly it is widely recognised that people who are depressed are more prone to commit suicide. Legitimising suicide will cut short the lives of some who might otherwise have recovered and gone on to many more happy and productive years.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the effect on our culture and attitudes over several generations is highly uncertain. Western culture instinctively regards human life as precious in and of itself, regardless of whose it is. Medical staff will battle to save the life of a patient, whether that patient is a prince or a pauper. Legitimising suicide slowly erode that attitude. Once we take the momentous first step down that road, who knows where it may end? The champions of assisted suicide for the terminally ill would be as opposed as I to a program like Hitler’s T4, but that is where our grandchildren may end up if we commit them to that path.

Two things remain to be said about this. Firstly it is outrageous to make the casual assumption that it would be a doctor’s job to assist suicide. I remember discussing it with a surgeon on one occasion who said “I wouldn’t do it. Let them hire some public executioners”. Even from an actuarial point of view it is nonsense. The practical arrangements required to kill people are easy. In a world where much of the population don’t have access to good medical care, doctors have better things to do.

Secondly suicide is usually a pretty selfish act. It may relieve my actual or anticipated suffering, but at the expense of the grief of relatives. A six year old really doesn’t want to hear that Granny is dead by her own hand.

Wonderful quote

2009-07-11T22:20:00.001+01:00

Lumumba (Kenyan anti-corruption activist) referring to President Obama:

“He’s not your typical Anglo-Saxon”

An Inconvenient Falsehood

2009-06-15T23:14:00.001+01:00

A friend recently loaned me the DVD of “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring Al Gore, the politician-turned-environmentalist who was beaten to the White House by George Bush.

The film was so full of half-truths that it is difficult to know where to start. One example will suffice. Al Gore cited the drying up of lake Chad as a result of Climate Change. It so happens that I spent three months flying light aircraft around Lake Chad in 1978. This was right at the end of a period of global cooling that took place between (roughly) 1960 - 1980 The level of the lake had been falling for years. There is not the slightest evidence that this had anything whatsoever to do with climate change. It might, but it seems unlikely.

But Gore’s biggest error was the classical one beloved of politicians, and the media: he confuses a positive correlation with a causal relationship. The issue is not whether the climate is changing, nor whether Carbon Dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, nor whether mankind’s activities are putting out Carbon Dioxide.

The point at issue is the linkage between these observations. Has the carbon dioxide caused the warming, or has the warming caused the carbon dioxide? Or are they both related to something else like sunspots, cloud cover or factor X that we haven’t discovered yet?

There is no “safe side” to this argument. If mankind’s activities are indeed the cause of climate change then Gore’s conclusions are correct (even if his arguments aren’t) and we should be putting our energies into curbing emissions. But if they are not, then carbon capture, carbon trading and all the rest are a dreadful waste of money and energy that we should be putting into safe drinking water supplies, irrigation, storm warning systems and flood defences.

More Perverted Science…

2009-06-08T22:40:00.001+01:00

The Guardian (19th May 2009) quoted Sir David Attenborough: this little creature is going to show our connection with all other mammals. Google changed it’s home page icon to reflect the find. On 21 May 2009, the Daily Mail trumpeted Scientists find the 'missing link': A 47million-year-old lemur that could revolutionise how we see human evolution.

But also on 21 May, the New Scientist published an article Why Ida fossil is not the missing link. On 24th May, the Times weighed in with Origin of the Specious: Ida the fossil was hailed as the ‘missing link’ in our evolution. Don’t believe the hype

Because it was hype. The early enthusiasm for the “missing link” idea was based on press releases and media rights rather than scholarly content and careful analysis. Ida was dug up in 1983 and reportedly one of the protagonists had bought her for a large sum of money – which he was presumably trying to recoup. She is an amazing fossil, but later and more sober assessment appears to have concluded that she adds almost nothing to our understanding of human evolution.

We can do without this kind of thing. If science is going to work at all it requires a critical mass of integrity. Once again, as with NASA climate change data, not only does that integrity appears to have been lacking, but also the perpetrators appear to have escaped any significant censorship

The lights of a Perverted Science

2009-04-24T22:42:00.001+01:00

Sir Winston used the phrase in his “Finest Hour” speech: and now I have seen it in a respected free world organisation, and my heart quails.

There are four major sources publishing data on world temperatures: the Hadley Centre (UK), NASA, UAH (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa). The Hadley, UAH and RSS data sets show temperature rise having more or less levelled out since 2000. The NASA dataset is radically different, suggesting a large and significant rise. This throws doubt on the NASA data.

It gets worse, much worse however. If you compare the NASA data published in 1999 with the NASA data published in 2009 for the same historical data they are substantially different: and different in a way which supports the climate change hypothesis.

It is fairly clear that NASA has been fiddling the books.

Forget the argument about climate change. This is a harbinger of “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science”. Fiddling data is the unforgivable sin. If an organisation like NASA can get away with it, then the bedrock on which we have accumulated much of our knowledge of the world is breaking up, and all we have left is a fight between the loudest voices and the deepest pockets.

A lovely day for Anoraks

2009-04-18T22:20:00.000+01:00

I've just got back from the Battery Vehicle Society Spring conference. It was one of the best one day event of any kind that I have ever attended - a good number of speakers, very varied, but not a single dud amongst them. Appropriate venue, faultless organisation.

I struggle to pick a highlight but the most memorable bits included a chap who had invested about £40-grand in a ton and a half of Lithium Polymer batteries to put into his Berlingo Electrique to make a super - long-range EV. Others were seeing a real live Zebra battery, some supercapacitors and a talk from a chap designing a rover for a Mars mission. On coming back I joined the EV network - a database of EV charging points public and private (the latter available to other members). I was also encouraged to come across a couple of others who share my scepticism about man-made climate change

£5000 Subsidy for battery vehicles

2009-04-16T21:32:00.000+01:00

The government today announced a subsidy (probably from 2011) on battery-powered vehicles. I was saddened by the welter of vitriolic and grossly - ill-informed comment this generated. Even worse, much of it wasn't even the product of independent thought, but a fairly transparent regurgitation of a monumentally misinformed piece on Top Gear.

For the record

There are no current widespread commercial applications for hydrogen fuel cells
Lithium batteries (the most likely chemistry for a battery vehicle) are used in a high proportion of the world's consumer electronics
The very first hydrogen fuel cell car would require a vast infrastructure investment in hydrogen production and distribution (tankers, filling stations)
A battery vehicle with an onboard charger needs a 13 Amp socket
A million battery vehicles would use less than 1 % of UK generating capacity. Further growth could scale as required using incremental addition of well-understood commercial technology

Bendy Buses

2009-03-23T18:26:00.000Z

I understand that some bendy buses are running around London bearing the slogan There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

I trust that these buses are being routed well clear of Hannibal Lector's home. Or those of convicted Paedophiles. Or those who enjoy beating up people of different racial origins.

Maybe they just mean illicit pleasures that are currently regarded as socially acceptable??

American Christianity and politics

2008-12-26T20:24:00.001Z

I recently came across this speech that Obama gave a couple of years back to a Christian group and I think it points up a trend in the influence of Christianity on US politics. One of the guys Obama mentions, Jim Wallis, was a prime mover in a delegation of US churchmen who visited Tony Blair before the Iraq war and attempted to persuade him not to jump.

My reading (from 3000 miles away) of what has happened in the US in recent years is that the Democratic party has been dominated by a secular fundamentalism which attempts to ban any reference to God in public life (e.g. the language checker in our American HR software which objects to "Christmas" and suggests "holiday" instead). This has (unsurprisingly) driven many Christians into the arms of people like Falwell and through them, the Republicans. This support has in turn been used to shore up an increasingly theocratic regime which (probably mistakenly rather than cynically) confuses America and the Kingdom of God.

I think what is interesting is that we might be at a tipping point. Even the most honey-tongued televangelist must be running out of ways of persuading anyone who has actually read the Sermon on the Mount that the current Republican executive maps onto Jesus's blueprint for human relationships! I am fascinated that Obama sounds like he thinks along the same lines as Wallis.

To make it work, I think Christians have to persuade rather than pronounce; if for example they want to lower the rate of abortions for social reasons, to provide arguments that the secular humanist can subscribe to, rather than just expecting them to accede to a Christian viewpoint. The secular humanists meanwhile have to drop this absurd notion that religion and politics don't mix and give Christians and other religious believers the space to express themselves in theological terms on the public stage as King (and indeed Lincoln) did.

Christmas stamps

2008-12-19T17:47:00.000Z

I was told that the UK Post Office were offering a mixture of secular and Christian stamp designs this Christmas. This seemed odd to me given the nature of Christmas as a Christian festival (it would seem pretty weird to print secular stamps for Ede, Hanukkah or Diwali).

However I didn't mind very much so long as I could get Christian designs. When I tried to purchase some stamps 6 days before Christmas though, I was told that my local Post office had long since run out of the Christian designs. Since when does a post office run out of stamps? And what are those small-minded enough to object to a Christian festival doing sending Christmas cards anyway? Christmas without the Christian bit seems to make as much sense as a rock concert without music.

"Positive" Discrimination

2008-06-27T21:33:00.000+01:00

The UK Government is proposing legislation which would make it legal to discriminate against white males in, for example, promotions at work. Their reasoning is that they want to try to even up gender and racial imbalances in the work place.

If we are going to have positive discrimination to even up gender imbalances in the workplace, can we have positive discrimination in divorce courts to even up the imbalance of custody between men and women in divorce cases (90% of single parents are women)?

Or drop the whole stupid idea. Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcomes.

Lisbon treaty

2008-06-14T15:26:00.000+01:00

Henceforth I will fly only by Ryan air and drink only Irish whiskey. The Irish people have spoken for 400 million disenfranchised European citizens and kicked the wretched EU constitution into touch.

One wonders what part of the word "no" our politicians are struggling with. Most of us are in favour of an economic community (facilitating trade) but do not want a political union. If it ever happens it will be the beginning of the end of democracy in Europe - for the same reason that democracy doesn't work well in parts of Africa. Tribalism. One-person-one-vote only works if those persons loyalty is primarily to the political entity whose leaders they are choosing. Most of us feel national loyalties more strongly than European ones.

Cars and Commuting

2008-06-03T21:48:00.000+01:00

There has been some discussion at work about greening the workplace. There are lots of politically correct things to do like recycling paper and ink cartridges and using low-power laptops. Most of these things pale into insignificance however when compared with the impact of commuting to the workplace.

As a ball-park figure, a car needs about 1 Kilowatt-hour to go 5 miles. Even ignoring engine and drivetrain efficiency (lousy, especially for the first part of the journey in winter when the engine is cold), this still works out to a Megawatt-hour per day for 250 people doing 10 miles each way. There are several possible ways to reduce this.

Encourage home working, maybe following BT's lead and having people formally based at home and hot desking when they come into the office for meetings.
Apply pressure for better public transport links (minibuses to business parks from park-and-ride locations??)
Encourage care sharing/pooling
State a policy to provide electric vehicle charging points at work. Many of us could commute in currently-available electric vehicles if there was recharging at work.

Electric vehicles still burn power, but less of it and produced with:

a greater range of energy sources other than oil (including renewables)
greater thermal efficiency (a fixed power station is more efficient than the true lifetime efficiency of a car engine which some sources put below 5%)
more efficient distribution (electricity is distributed by wires with a small loss compared with the additional fuel burn of petrol tankers)
less atmospheric pollution (fixed power stations again)

Electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles have a further longer term emergent eco-system benefit. With the right control software a critical mass of electric vehicles nationally could be used to smooth power demand. At present a significant amount of generating capacity has to be kept on idle standby to cope with peaks and troughs in demand (e.g. everyone putting the kettle on at the start of cup-final half time). A million EV batteries could do the same job (the grid charges the batteries during play and borrows a bit back at half time)

He who sits in the Heavens will laugh them to scorn

2008-05-10T22:32:00.000+01:00

The God Delusion. written by Richard Dawkins (an Oxford academic) is an outspoken attack on religious faith in general and Christianity in particular. It is brilliantly written, although the actual content is sloppy and naive. One among many examples of this naivety is his handling of the story of Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac, which Dawkins roundly condemns, in effect accusing Yahweh (the name often used for God in the Old Testament) of child abuse.

I have met many Western Christians who are also uneasy about this story. I think both are mistaken. They are attempting to interpret the text through their own cultural filters and failing to see it through the eyes of those about whom and to whom it was written.

We know that human sacrifice was widespread in the centuries before and soon after the Old Testament period.

In the ancient Near East the God Molech is described by many authors as consuming living babies.
Chemosh in Moab required the occasional human sacrifice.
The tomb of Queen Pur-Abi in Ur (the city from which Abraham had come) contained the remains of 5 soldiers and 23 ladies in waiting.
It is believed by some that Phoenicians and Carthaginians sacrificed children.
In the Americas, the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca almost certainly practiced human sacrifice.
There is evidence for it amongst the Celts and the Vikings,
and in India and China.

Now imagine the story of Abraham, not being read by an academic living at a time when human sacrifice has been outlawed for millenia, but being heard around the campfire by people to whom human sacrifice was the norm. To them, the really shocking thing about the story would not have been that Yahweh said "do it" (that is what gods did in those days) but that Yahweh subsequently said "stop".

And people, particularly people who do not have access to books, learn through stories. To a peasant who has grown up with human sacrifice, this is a story with an unforgettable punch line: a story worth a thousand finger-wagging admonishments. Here is a God on the point of getting the ultimate sacrifice from one of his followers saying "stop - I don't want it"

It is arguable that this story of Abraham and Isaac has actually been redundant for the last thousand years, having done the job God intended for it. The three Abrahamic religions have wiped human sacrifice, once so common, from the face of the earth. It is banned in every country on the planet and has almost completely disappeared from every culture. We cannot wind back and re-run history without Abraham, but it is a fair guess that this story which Dawkins so derides has played a part in that triumph.

Below 50 Degrees South

2008-04-20T21:40:00.000+01:00

The Southern ocean is one of the wildest and most inhospitable place on earth. There is an old saying that "south of 40 degrees south there is no law and south of 50 degrees there is no god".

In a 1996 single handed round-the-world race, Tony Bullimore went missing. One TV programme I saw about him at the time said that his wife, a Christian, organised prayer meetings on his behalf

To everyone's astonishment, a P3 Orion spotted the upturned hull of his yacht in the vastness of the Southern ocean. It had suffered a keel failure which had caused it to roll inverted. Bullimore survived in an air pocket in the capsized hull. Later an Australian destroyer rescued him after 5 days in the upturned hull.

The position of the rescue? 52 degrees south.

"... whither shall I flee from thy presence?..If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;..Even there thy right hand shall hold me."

Contempt and Idolatry

2008-03-15T11:08:00.000Z

In the 18th Century, Lord Chesterfield once wrote to his son "Speak of the Moderns without contempt and the Ancients without idolatry"

Our danger is the reverse: to idolise contemporary celebrities and to pass judgement on the wisdom and scholarship of the past on the basis of our vague and tawdry moral code

Green posturing?

2008-03-14T21:36:00.000Z

How many of our green priorities are just posturing, and how much is tied to real benefit to real people? A few months back, I read an article on green laptops (the key issue being power consumption).

This is just daft. The power used by a laptop is a minute fraction of the power consumed in a typical office day. A typical laptop consumes between 7 and 30 watts depending on load. Even if I used my laptop for 8 hours at the higher figure, that is about 0.25 k.watt-hours in a working day.

My daily commute consumes at least thirty times that. It's about 40 miles/day and takes about an hour. My car probably uses about 10 HP in cruise. That is about 7.5 k.watt-hours a day ( I am making the assumption - generous to the laptop - that my car engine is about as efficient as a fixed power station at turning fuel into usable power)

Many authorities suggest that dropping your cruising speed from (say) 65 m.p.h to 60, increasing your tyre pressure, or lowering the weight of the car saves a significant percentage. If you do the arithmetic, only filling your fuel tank half way (to keep the weight down) would probably do more real good than swapping the worst laptop for the best. If you combined that with dropping your cruising speed 5 mph, and/or timing your commute to avoid peak traffic, you would blow any possible laptop power savings into the weeds.

You could do similar calculations on office heating and probably even the power consumed by the office kettle or in the staff canteen. Laptop power consumption is a drop in a bucket. There are far bigger wins that are easier and cheaper.

Not a little KNOWLEDGE but a little LEARNING

2008-03-10T22:11:00.000Z

One of the most frequently misquoted sayings in English must be Alexander Pope's "A little learning is a dangerous thing..". It often becomes "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...".

The two are most emphatically not the same. A little knowledge in the hands of a learned man or woman is perfectly safe and usually helpful. Great knowledge in the hands of someone of little learning is a recipe for arrogance.

Tonal Languages

2008-02-29T22:21:00.000Z

Chinese (at least Mandarin, the most common dialect) is a tonal language. That is the the difference between a rising and a falling tone completely changes the meaning of a word. So for example, a sharp "shh" sound means "is" - if the tone is falling (like a steam locomotive on a gradient). On the other hand it can mean "poem" if the tone is level (like shushing a child whispering during a film). If the tone rises it means "ten".

English on the other hand is not tonal - or is it? The meaning of the word "Really" for example changes radically with the tone. With a falling tone it conveys scepticism or unbelief. A rising tone conveys interest or surprise.

STENDEC

2008-01-26T21:26:00.000Z

On 2 August 1947 a Lancastrian airliner crashed in the Andes. No traces of the aircraft were found in contemporary searches, but 50 years later the mystery was largely solved when bits of Lancastrian, and the remains of most of the passengers and crew were spat out by the Tupungato glacier. All on board had been killed in what (for those days) was a very common type of accident - flying into a hill in cloud.

A mystery remains however: the official record suggests that the last radio transmission from the aircraft (in morse code) was ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs STENDEC.

This message was clearly odd, because to this day no-one can begin to understand what STENDEC might have meant. It was repeated three times, very fast but apparently clearly. There is however another oddity. The message was received at 17.41, which means that the crew apparently believed themselves to be four minutes from touchdown.

This is however impossible if the crew had the slightest idea of their altitude. Current estimates are that the aircraft hit the ground at about 15,000 feet above sea level. Santiago is around 1,500 feet above sea level. In an unpressurised aircraft, 500 ft a minute is a comfortable rate of descent with passengers on board. Even if they pushed it to 1000 feet a minute the descent alone, quite apart from manoeuvring for landing, would take 15 minutes or so. Either the altimeter readings were way off or the last radio message was transcribed wrongly.

We know from accounts of WWII bomber operations that icing was a serious and sometimes fatal hazard. From contemporary photos, the Lancastrian did not appear to have any de-icing equipment, which would have made airframe icing a grave danger. If severe icing was encountered, the only way out was down - a problem if you are over high terrain in cloud.

If part of the message (the ETA) was wrong, the STENDEC bit could be wrong too. If you look at the morse for STENDEC and the morse for the word ICING with the letter separators changed, there is a lot of similarity:

... - . -. -.. . -.-. (Stendec)
.. - . -. .. -. - -. (Icing)

Futhermore, Icing is the only word that I can think of which could stand on it's own and not need to be part of a longer sentence or phrase like fuel low or engine losing power. If it had happened the radio operator would have understood the peril, which would explain the rapid repetition. It all fits, although we shall never know for sure.

Bali Climate Change Conference

2007-12-22T20:58:00.000Z

In 1999, the UN estimated the cost of bringing safe water and sanitation to everyone on the globe who needed it at around US$25bn annually over 8 - 10 years (that is about 7 times the UK-only expenditure on pet food). The UN went on to suggest that contaminated water is responsible for 80% of disease in the developing world and kills a child every 8 seconds. It is a tragedy and a scandal which totally dwarfs the worst possible effects of global warming.

The recent conference in Bali on climate change was reportedly attended by 15,000 people. If we estimate the cost of travel, accommodation, payroll-related costs and incidental expenses for the 12 day conference at US$5,000 per person, then the cost of just these items (quite apart from the cost of the venue) for just this one event was $US75 million or about 3% of the annual expenditure on water that the UN is looking for.

An African housewife carrying 20 kg of water several km a day might be forgiven for thinking that all this global warming stuff is an excuse for Western junketing. Oh, and why Bali? I am told that it is a nice place for a holiday; but camping in an remote part of Africa would have concentrated the minds better, especially if delegates had to dodge the crocodiles to fetch their own water from the river.

Road Deaths

2007-12-22T20:14:00.000Z

When I was working in what was then called "Accident Research" in the early 1970s, there were around 8000 deaths a year on British roads. In 2005 the figure was about 3200. Even 1 is too many, but I take some satisfaction that our work was not altogether a waste of time.

Libraries

2007-12-14T20:19:00.000Z

The cost per loan of a number of London Lending libraries exceed £10. It would be cheaper to hand out Amazon tokens and let people keep the books.

The paper book is unlikely to die any time soon, but the public lending library as a holder of physical stocks of books and journals probably will

Climate Change - 39000 gigatonnes

2007-12-05T21:53:00.000Z

We are currently releasing about 8 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere annually as a result of fossil fuel burn. The oceans store about 39000 gigatonnes of carbon. In other words current work on anthropegenic climate change is like trying to detect the footsteps of an ant whilst an elephant is charging around the place.

2007-11-12T20:36:00.000Z

For my first post, a word of explanation. Vifaa is a Swahili word meaning useful things or maybe appropriate stuff