INORGANIC ORGANICS I have to wonder how many people actually carry out the quite simple exercise of checking the meaning of words in a dictionary. Doing so, they might learn just how much gobbledegook is being flung at them every day. And just how much advertizers and those with more political motives, are perpetually playing on their fears and ignorance. Hypo-allergenic shampoo, for example, is not one that prevents allergic reaction, just one that contains lower levels of the proteins that do cause an allergic reaction. The compound word means ‘less allergens’ – one of those utterly meaningless statements of which advertizers are fond because there’s less chance of Trading Standards jumping on them. The question you have to ask is: less allergens than what? A patch of stinging nettles? A wasp’s nest? Obviously the intention of putting these buzz-words on bottles is not to inform, but to blind with science. Perhaps realising this people could then ask themselves why fruit additives are good or why washing with herbs will give you an orgasm? At its root, all this obfuscation is playing on the simplistic idea that natural is good and chemical is bad (This ignores everyday facts of life e.g. because we drink chemically-treated water we are utterly free of natural cholera and amoebic dysentry), which brings me, by a roundabout route, to the incredible ignorance surrounding the word ‘organic’. While driving around in rural Essex it’s quite common to see signs up advertising all sort of items for sale – knackered lawn mowers, ancient cars, flowers, honey – and some of the signs display literacy ranging from the poetic to the abysmal. But just lately I’ve been noticing a trend set by ‘greenies’, adopted by supermarkets, and promulgated by stupidity. Now you can buy organic manure, organic cheese, organic eggs… Do the people who started this strange craze have any idea what ‘organic’ means? Could they please explain to me what inorganic cheese, manure or eggs might be? If you are green then you’ll probably think it means items produced without any of those nasty chemical thingies. What utter drivel. Everything is made of chemicals or their constituent elements. They are not something recently created by evil science but something derived from what is already here. Monosodium glutamate (flavour enhancer) … yuk, we don’t want any of that – far too many syllables. Ever wondered why tomatoes enhance a dish? Because they’re packed with MSG. An essential chemical we must ingest every day is sodium chloride: the product of a metal that if held in the hand would result in you being hospitalized shortly after, and the basic constituent of mustard gas. It is also a chemical three oxygen atoms away from being a powerful bleach and weedkiller. How about these terrible sounding compounds: diallyl disulphide, diallyl trisulphide, S-2-propenylcysteine sulphoxide … The list is a long one, but can be contracted to one word: garlic. That which is organic is something relating to or derived from plants or animals, or it is any of a class of compounds based on carbon. Interestingly, a final definition in the dictionary I’m presently studying, is: any substance such as a pesticide or fertilizer derived from animal or vegetable matter. So, organic food that you buy in the supermarket can have been sprayed with a nicotine insecticide or the organic chemical DDT. In fact few insecticides and fertilizers are not the product or organic chemistry, so they are organic. In fact, some of the most poisonous substances on this planet are products of organic chemistry, whether performed in a laboratory or in the more potent chemical laboratories inside living things. Oh my goodness, chemicals, I hear you cry. Sigh. Get with reality. Curare is organic, so why not spread some of that on your wholegrain bread and see how you get on? And next time you buy your organic potatoes, remember they could have been sprayed with the organic compound agent orange and that would make them no less ORGANIC!! Ends
Tag: Science
God is not Great — Christopher Hitchens
Having watched, listened to and enjoyed numerous video clips of Christopher Hitchens on You Tube I decided to buy his book God is not Great (How Religion Poisons Everything) and now, being about a third of the way in, I can make some comparisons between it and the Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. In essence the two writers have assaulted the same territory and the books are very similar, but they have approached it from different directions. Dawkins is a scientist used to conveying his ideas in an as clear and concise a manner as possible and, having donned some literary garb, is still doing the same thing but in a much more palatable way for the general reader. Hitchens has approached the whole territory from the literary side and is more focused on that angle than the sometimes quite arid and exact scientific viewpoint, which certainly comes out when you hear Dawkins speak. Certainly Hitchens is just as sincere and strong in his opinions as Dawkins, but he’s also more concerned with writerly flourishes and probably the opinion of the literary critics in his circle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still enjoying his book’s pyrotechnics immensely, and recommend it, however, thus far I prefer The God Delusion.
Article 10: Into The Machine.
Here’s another old one.
INTO THE MACHINE
The image that sticks in my mind, from the covers of early Science Fiction paperbacks, is of a robot, like the bastard offspring of a dustbin and a food processor, chasing a half-naked woman across some lunatic professor’s laboratory. Of course, as was the case with many SF pulps of the time, the stories inside were intelligent, and bore no relation to the cover picture. For this the writers should have fed the publisher feet-first into his own printing press. Ever since early SF writers cast the robot in the role of Frankenstein’s monster, the image of a sentient machine murdering its makers and taking over, has endured – examples of the type being Terminator, HAL, and numerous Dr Who baddies (I’m sure any of you reading this can think of many more). However, for machines to take over bespeaks a certain superiority that does not yet seem likely. First, we must make them better than ourselves. Although we are even now developing computers that can out-think us in many specific respects, the science of cybernetics, and straightforward material technologies have a long way to go. A computer can beat a man at chess – great – but can it actually pick up the pieces and move them, recognise certain members in the audience, converse with its opponent, then walk away from the table afterwards? We can make a mechanical hand that has a more powerful grip than our own and it can move with eerie similarity, but will it function for eighty years without falling apart? We are an awfully long way from being able to create something that can outperform a human being. All this is moot, though, for the development of human technology that has taken us from the flint arrowhead to the PC, follows an undeviating course. All our machines are merely tools – extensions of ourselves. Just as binoculars are an extension of human sight, books are an extension of human memory and communication, and just as pair of pliers is an extension of the human hand, the computer is an extension of the human mind. These are, in the main, indirect extensions. But we try to make them more direct all the time: soft shaped grips for the pliers; Windows, mouse, the virtual glove and voice recognition for the computers. We are moving closer all the time – getting into the machine. Most direct extensions are at present the province of the medical world. Prosthetics have been around since before Captain Hook and in the last century most of us have seen moveable plastic limbs. Prosthetics are, like the rest of our tools, extensions of us. Now consider where they are going. This technology is developing at an increasing rate: from such devices to assist the body, as do pacemakers and the Jarvik heart pump, we are leaping ahead to those that actually restore function, such as chips surgically implanted to restore sight to the blind. Already being tested are prosthetic limbs that can be surgically attached and wired into the nervous system (the most interesting advance being feedback i.e. making fingertips that can actually feel). Through people like Kevin Warwick, who is actively experimenting with implants to link him to a computer, and through advances in medical prosthetics, we will eventually reach a stage where the replacement is better than the part replaced, or will provide additional abilities. People are going to want these – needed or otherwise. It could be argued that at this point it would be possible for the superior computer/AI mind to acquire its required physical interface with the world, strangle the mad professor, then march off to exterminate the rest of the human race. However, by then it would be too late for the machines to take over, for we will be as much, if not more than them. By the time we can build a machine that could destroy us, we’ll be able to upgrade ourselves to equivalent or greater efficacy. Pursuing Warwick’s experiments to one conclusion, it will be possible for the computer to truly become an extension of the human mind – directly linked, not via a nerve impulse to open doors. This may come about as a medical technique for restoring/curing the brain damaged, or it might be developed as the next quickest way to get onto the Internet. Whatever. There will come a time when someone will be able to go into a shop to buy extended memory or larger processing power, and it won’t be for their PC, or rather, the lines will be so blurred that PC and person will be indistinguishable. Your future girlfriend won’t be staying in because she’s washing her hair, but because she’s running a virus check and defrag on what lies underneath it. Often in SF, the humans are little different from us, and the machines vastly superior. The truth of the matter I feel is that in the next few centuries definitions of what is human will become rather hazy, and the individual of that future unrecognisable to us. In the end humans will be able to upload/download their minds into machines, extend their memory, leave part of their minds in machines, load machine minds and programming into their own. Their bodies might be more synthetics than flesh while biotechnology would have by then given us living computers. Pointing to different items and classifying one as a machine and one as a human being will be as difficult as distinguishing egg white and sugar in a meringue. Of course, all the above refutes many of the plot elements of Gridlinked with its omnipotent AIs, psychotic android and indefatigable Golem, which goes to prove that truth may well be stranger than fiction, and that writers are not to be trusted. ENDS
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!
All rather confirms what I already know about the ‘green’ movement. Okay, you’ve done protesting, now get back to Mummy and Daddy’s house in Berkshire.(From Devil’s Kitchen)
Article 8: Hype and Agendas
Phew, this one has dated a bit…
HYPE AND AGENDAS
It is a constant source of annoyance to me how facts are twisted to either fit political agendas or to hype stories, and that when you peel all of that away, even the facts are dubious. Take for example the recent furore concerning passive smoking. Apparently, breathing secondhand cigarette smoke increases your chances of getting lung cancer by 25%. Most people, whose acquaintance with mathematics was an unhappy affair from childhood to teens and quickly forgotten, will illogically look at that percentage and think breathing secondhand smoke gives them a one in four chance of getting lung cancer. They don’t seem to realise that to understand the statement you need to first know what your chances are without breathing that smoke. They are about 1% – one in a hundred. A 25% increase in your chances of getting lung cancer means these odds rise by a quarter per cent – substantially less than your odds of being killed in a car accident, of committing suicide or being gunned down. But how much passive smoking are we talking about: a lifetime serving behind a bar or a whiff of cigar smoke in your high street? Well, you can guarantee those odds are predicated on the first instance and not the second. Another fact the media is throwing at us lately is that human-produced CO2 is causing global warming which will lead to an eco-catastrophe. There are stories about this every day now because it’s ‘sexy’. ‘The scientists’ – as much in love with appearing on TV as those sad cases in the Big Brother house – try to mention this in relation to any research they are conducting. Thus we learn that a recent shot to Venus will enable us to learn much about the coming disaster, for the greenhouse effect is operating there and on the surface the temperature is high enough to melt lead. The usual corollary is that if we carry on as we are, Earth could end up like Venus. One tiny tiny point is neglected, that being Venus’s 26,000,000 mile closer proximity to the sun. A probe sent merely to study that planet is not going to get as much airtime as one sent to study global warming. Those same scientists, aware that global warming is a touchstone of political correctness, know that towing-the-line is the best way to get their funding renewed, and that nay-saying a good way of getting yourself cast out into wilderness. Recent studies of Antarctic ice cores prove that our present CO2 levels are higher than ever before. Shock, horror, probe! Further research reveals that the timescale of these cores is almost entirely self-referential, and that one warm day at any time in the past can destroy as much as centuries of data. So what would a past period of global warming do – before anyone started up an SUV – wipe out evidence of itself? And where does our CO2 come from? Burning fossil fuels. How were those fossil fuels produced? By plants. Where was the CO2 throughout the process when the plants trapped it? Erm. Should we consider the Carboniferous period, when all this was occurring and every square inch of Earth burgeoned with growth, to be a time of eco-catastrophe? Also, the Arctic is melting and polar bears starving because they can’t get to their food. Again a bit of further research reveals that the Arctic has always gone through cycles of melting like this. The last time was sixty years ago when it was hotter there than now. The availability of food for polar bears is less simply because their population has grown and there is greater competition for what there is. And while the Artic is melting, the Anarctic is doing precisely the opposite. Another misleading story is the one that is the basis of all the above: our CO2 production is causing global warming. Ask anyone now, what is the main cause of the greenhouse effect (without which, it must be noted, we’d all be under a few hundred feet of ice by now) and because of the nonsense in the media every day they will reply, “CO2!” Wrong. The main one is water vapour, which causes 95% of it and also rather shoots down the idea that hydrogen-powered cars will save us. CO2 causes 3% of it, and man-made production of the same is 3.5% of that. For those who believed the bull about passive smoking, let me make the calculation for you: our overall CO2 contribution to the greenhouse effect amounts to just over 0.1% – one part in a thousand. But the temperature is rising and those experts can’t be wrong! Just like they weren’t wrong back in the 70s when a group of them, after a few chilly winters, decided we were about to descend into a new Ice Age. In fact, only a few ‘experts’ said this, but the media grabbed that ball and ran with it. But what about the temperature rise of, supposedly, one degree? Well, on the one hand this could easily be part of the cyclic nature of Earth’s weather, on the other, even the ‘experts’ can’t agree on what the overall temperature of Earth is right now. There’s also some cherry-picking of the data. Most of the climate modelling done by the doomsayers takes its temperature data from weather stations, all on land, and most having their data corrupted by the heat of encroaching urbanization. The most accurate reading of Earth’s temperature is by satellites, which have shown very little rise at all. For the conspiracy theorists amidst us it might be worth noting that without global warming our government would have some problem justifying a near 80% tax on petrol. Also, that what we are supposed to do to prevent the eco-catastrophe, is precisely the same as what we should be doing in preparation for our fossil fuels running out. You have to ask yourself, which should I worry about most: global warming or that we are running out of the stuff that supposedly produces it? Way back in the mists of time an English teacher told the class I was attending to get hold of two papers with opposing political slants – the Sun and the Mirror or the Mail and the Guardian – and in them compare the reportage in each of the same story. It’s something everyone should do since it opens the eyes to the adage: They don’t like to let facts get in the way of a good story. From different reporters you might read the lines: ‘Man assists suicide of terminally-ill wife.’ Or ‘Brute slaughters sick wife.’ We must therefore, all of us, follow the dictates of that other adage: Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, to which I would make the alteration of ‘papers’ to ‘media’. In the end there is no ultimate font of truth in this world (even me), so we must all use our own judgement.
Article 6: GM Hysteria.
GM Hysteria.
Jayson and Michelle Whitaker were initially refused permission to have a designer baby by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Apparently it was ‘unlawful and unethical’ to save the life of their three-year-old son with a bone-marrow transplant from this second baby. Thankfully, sanity finally prevailed, and now the deed has been done.Putting aside questions about who comprise this ‘Authority’, whether or not they were elected (or another fucking quango), and what right they have to make such life-and-death decisions, it can be seen that this is one of the sillier examples of the hysterical fear that has gripped this country for too long, of ‘interfering with God’s work/nature’. The biggest bugbear is ‘GM’, though in the Whitaker case all the parents were doing was selecting the right child, not altering its DNA. ‘Unlawful and unethical’ in all cases such as this are vague terms modern hysterics have now transposed with the vaguer ‘against God or Nature’. These are applied to everything from Human fertilisation to GM crops. But first, let’s look at human DNA. As our medical technologies advance it is becoming increasingly obvious that most of the diseases killing us now are due to faults in our own DNA or in themselves need studying and tackling at a genetic level. Cancer, though in some cases having a viral or bacteriological cause, propagates by copying errors in the genetic blueprint. To truly defeat it we need to learn how to correct or completely delete those errors, straight chemical intervention mostly just delays the Reaper. The AIDS epidemic that is killing millions is caused by a virus that actually uses the T-cells of our immune system to propagate itself. Again straight forward chemical intervention does nothing more than delay the process. Real results are coming from us taking apart this virus and our own DNA so as to learn how to tackle AIDs. Cutting-edge genetic research is the answer – not reliance on God or Nature. The subject of GM crops is another one to get people banging their tambourines. Along with my acquisition of a garden came the beginning of a whole new vocabulary. I can now use the words hellebore and aquilegia and actually know what I’m talking about. I now also have a use for epithets, which I use less commonly in my writing, as prefixes for the words slug, snail, ant, and aphid. What, you ask, has this got to do with the GM debate? In reply I can tell you that I recently took part in the slaughter of the innocents. Two handfuls of slug pellets yielded me two litres of dead snails which I duly transferred to my council-subsidised composter. My garden, I’ll have you know, is just about big enough to get the Queen’s head on. Beyond it is a field in which it would fit many thousands of times. A friend of mine is a farmer and he applies slug pellets from a spreader on the back of a quad bike and my few handfuls, I know, translate into sackfuls for this purpose. The environmental cost of this is but a small proportion of the whole. Thousands of gallons of potent herbicides and insecticides are poured onto our land every year. GM crops need few of them, their yield is greater, therefore less land has to be used to produce the same amount of food. When are the hysterics going to realise that in this case we are already in a deep and poisonous hole from which GM just might drag us? The arguments against GM range from the apparently cogent to the plain silly. Tampering with the human genetic code will produce Midwitch Cuckoos who’ll take over, and consign old humans to the waste bin. Rubbish: it will result in years to come in the eradication of hereditary diseases, of faults, of people dying young or living lives governed by pill bottles, injections or the next pull on an inhaler, and it will be a slow process. There’s the idea that some super plant may wipe-out or displace established species. We’re already doing this with herbicides, and compared to what the natural world produces we are amateurs. Do the hysterics visualise armies of triffids marching across the English countryside? Get real. What we’re having trouble with, is what nature produces. What the hell is so frightening? Could GM produce poisonous plants, killer insects or animals, virulent and fatal diseases … er, nature already seems to be doing a pretty good job in those departments. Really, anyone who thinks that genetic modification is going to produce monsters that billions of years of evolution has not already produced is, frankly, an idiot. Nature or God, however, do provide us with natural and godlike things. There’s famine, plague, and other disasters that belittle our paltry attempts at the same. More species have been wiped-out by nature than we are ever likely to wipe-out. While we piddle-about with out little wars and exterminations nature comes along and puts us in our place. In the first world war we killed millions. The flu that came along after killed many millions more. Genocide? We’re rank amateurs. Black death killed twenty-five million, which was a third of the Earth’s population at that time. So, when you hear people ranting about nature and how we are playing God, please point out to them that we are not playing. We are trying to solve some serious problems and take control of our own existence. As for nature: we live in a world that is completely unnatural and, in reality, the only way any of us is going to get back to nature is when we’re buried in a paper coffin under a tree. ENDS.
Orson Scott Card on Global Warming.
Here’s the raw truth: All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the future, they can’t even predict that past. That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for those decades. In other words, the models don’t work. The only way to make them “work” is to take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally produces them. That’s not how honest science is done. — Orson Scott Card
You can read the whole thing here, and very good it is:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-03-04-1.html
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African Genes.
Hah, I wonder how many of the people refered to here are members of the BNP: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070124072328.htm
Interface
Not only do I love this sort of stuff, developments like this are pretty damned important: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070118121238.htm
Neural Darwinism.
Now, I’ve always ascribed to the dictum ‘use it or lose it’. If you don’t use your muscles they become weaker and if you don’t use them at all, as in the case of someone wheelchair bound, they atrophy. Getting yourself out of breath expands the capacity of your lungs. Swimming, and particulary swimming underwater is especially good in this respect. Putting stress on your bones strengthens them. Those whose bones remain unstressed for a length of time, like astronauts, rapidly lose bone mass. I’ve always thought that the same rules apply to the brain. If you don’t make any mental effort, your ability to make mental effort declines. I feel that this equally applies to those rather vague cognitive functions like imagination. And this article lays it all out very neatly.