So you actually don't want to solve the problem.

So climate change, what we used to call global warming, or was it cooling (I recall in the 70's we were all going to freeze to death "Day After Tomorrow" style), lets call it climate wobblyness just for fun.

Look I'm not a "denyer", you shove a load of CO₂ into the atmosphere and it will have an effect - and you can trust me on that because I have a BSc Hons in Earth Sciences^* - as to exactly what that effect is we're rather unsure but one thing is for certain the science is not "settled", as the whole sodding point of science is that it's never settled, and I certainly don't buy into the catastrophic alarmist crap which would mean that I'd have to be equipping the ponies with flotation devices in a couple of years. We also know that most of the alarmist pundits don't believe it either as otherwise Al Gore wouldn't have bought himself a beachfront property would he.

But anyway, lets for now accept there's a problem, so wouldn't you like to come up with a fix for this? Well it turns out someone has done here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15132989 basically by making little volcanic clouds. Not sure how you'd scale this up to planet size but one step at a time.

Only we're not making that step. Why?

"We are certainly not ready to carry out experiments, and this project should not just be delayed, but should be cancelled immediately," [Eco weenie who wears batik dresses and has probably named her kid Galadriel Moonbeam, Helena Paul] told BBC News.

"This is particularly important because while the scientists involved keep saying that reducing emissions is the primary necessity, they risk distracting attention from that necessity at a crucial moment."

Because there's only one solution isn't there. That's the one that involves us giving up on the material benefits of progress, turning our societies into some agrarian collectivist monstrosity the very idea of which gets Helena moist and chasing after a small green dragon because he drives a 4x4 and lit up his patio heater this weekend.

You don't want a solution because actually solving global warming doesn't fit your agenda.



^* OK so I specialised in what mud does and how water flows through rocks but I'm a damned sight more qualified that 99% of the people spouting off of the subject.as I have at least done some climate modelling.

I think that closes the matter

Stephen Hawking, the smartest man on the planet, has done lots of hard sums and says

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/02/stephen-hawking-big-bang-creator

I believe that settles things. Case closed. All you religiots can go home now as the last "gap" your "god of the gaps" could have been hiding in isn't there any more.

Now can I have my fucking planet back from you please!

I get my centaur after all

Yay! Another shoeing for the sky-pixie's followers yesterday in the commons where sense (and no doubt a government whip whispering things about "vote for centaurs or we will let slip the pictures of you and that mare trying to create one the old fashioned way) prevailed and human-animal hybrids got the go ahead.

What I find truly ugly though is the depths that the invisible fairy's friends will stoop to to impose their delusion on the rest of us. Let's take a look at some of the things that they said shall we...

Ex-minister Edward Leigh, who led the fight against the creation of hybrid "admixed" embryos, said they were "ethically wrong and almost certainly medically useless".

And you are qualified to make a descision about whether something is medically useless because? According to your Wikipedia page you're a member of the landed gentry, have a degree in History and qualified as a barrister. You are about as scientifically and medially qualified as a slice of toast so you can just shut right the fuck up.

He said there was "no evidence yet to substantiate" claims the work could lead to treatment for degenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

If there even the tiniest sliver of a chance that throwing babies in a blender would lead to treatment for these evil conditions then we should be supporting them. I suppose you've never come into contact with these diseases have you? I suppose you think that dribbling into your soup is God punishing you for original sin? Words are barely adequate to describe how I think of you, you utter waste of DNA.

But then he goes and says...

"In embryos, we do have the genetic make up of a complete human being and we could not and should not be spliced together with the animal kingdom."

I have a bit of bad news for you here, fucktard. You ARE a member of the animal kingdom, hard as it is to believe as you appear to display all the intellectual capacity of seaweed.

And ex-Labour minister Sir Gerald Kaufman, agreed, adding: "How far do you go? Where do you stop? What are the limits and what are the boundaries?

Ah, the "thin end of the wedge" argument, you know if someone trots this out their position is truly fucked. Well Gerald, you don't stop, you go full throttle. There's no grumpy old man with a beard there so the sole purpose of the exercise is to make life more bearable whilst we're here and getting rid of or at least mitigating the effects of disease is noble and honorable and we should persue it with all the energies and skills humankind (and dragonkind) can muster. You want to sit in a cave mumbling about how god-of-mountain-will-be-angry-rain-down-fire then off you go but kindly fuck the hell out of everyone else's chance to have a pain free old age where they can actually remember who their relatives are, you wankstain.

I also noticed this bit of reportage:

However, the majority of the Tory shadow cabinet, including shadow foreign secretary William Hague and shadow home secretary David Davis, backed the unsuccessful attempt to ban hybrids.

Same old Tories then. Time to scrawl "None of you fuckers" on the ballot paper I guess.

And in signing off I saw there was an extra win...

A separate attempt to ban "pure" hybrid embryos, that would mix a human egg with animal sperm or vice versa, was also defeated in the Commons by 286 votes to 223, a government majority of 63.

Now it's been a while since I did biology but how does that work, I thought that the chromasome counts didn't match up? Can anyone explain this to me and why we don't already have centaurs, satyrs and lots of half-man/half-sheep creatures wandering around Wales?

(And yes, getting a bit bored with baiting scammers now so I'm going to post more; anyway it's eurovision time which is always good for a post or four)

At the sound of the woman being stoned, Mecca Standard Time will be...

It's always hilarious when religious people try to use science to back up their claims to the existence of their particular brand of sky pixie but this is the first time I've seen the Muslims crawl out from under their rock only to make themselves look more backward than we thought they were in the first place.

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Right. Well if you were to cut out a model of the UK and find the place where that model would balance you find that its somewhere just outside Blackburn, Lancashire. However I don't see anyone proposing the town famous for having lots of holes and a really cheap shoe shop to be made capital of Great Britain.

So what piece of scientific wisdom have they come up with to bolster the claim of Mecca Standard Time?

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

Errr.. where did this guy do his training. First thing they taught us when I did Geology (University of Lancaster, class of '86, I graduated Draco Cum Laude) was the Earth's magnetic poles move about and that "magnetic north" is different depending on where you are, it even flips round so north becomes south every so often. Ali Al Bottyburp, muslim scientist extraordinare, can't even claim that it lines up at Mecca because a quick shufty over at the US Geological Service shows that the magnetic deviation at 21°25′00″N 39°49′00″E happens to be 2.6 degrees. Here's a nice map if you want to have a look yourself.

But what's science when you can wilfully ignore history.

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

Not really. We were a pretty important maritime power but not particularly colonial at the time and I think you'll find that the world adopted the zero meridian at Greenwich because the Brits just happened to be the first to discover a reliable method of working out longditude during sea voyages. Either way most people call it "UTC" from the French for "Universal Co-ordinated Time" now.

I think it's high time we put to bed this myth of the muslim world being great scientists who discovered astronomy, chemistry and the like. They didn't. At best they managed to preserve Greek learning and just plundered the rest from places like India.

And as to adopting Mecca Standard Time, when you lot can present me with a Geologists that is acually capable of passing a GCSE science exam then I will listen to you, and will still tell you to fuck off.

I still want my centaur

Oh what joy. I figured the sky pixie's fanclub would not take the creation of animal human hybrids (blogged about here)lying down and indeed they did not, throwing their wafers and incense burners out of the pram over the weekend they celebrate the nailing of their deity to a plank. And true to form Bottler Brown caves in to the religious lobby because half his fucking cabinet is made up of left footers and would make for a few embarrassing headlines when the house divided and they went through the wrong door.

I am a torn dragon as I do not know which set of bastards to set fire to first. First the wankers in the pulpits spouting bollocks about shit they could not, blinded by their fairy stories as they are, possibly even begin to understand - a cure for alzheimers disease, no you don't want that, it would offend god, you just sit there and fucking drool. Second their placemen in parliament who are answerable not to the people of this country but to the head of a foreign power in Italy. It's these cunts that really fuck me off; to my mind we are a secular country (nominally I know we aren't but we're certainly not a catholic one) and if you have a religious faith you either check it at the door when you walk into the lawmaking chambers or you fuck right the hell out of public office. Frankly I think anyone with a delusional illness that makes them believe in fairies, invisible pink unicorns or a 2000 year old dead man who talks to them is certifiably insane and therefore unfit for public office of any kind whatsoever.

Hmmm... religious and politicians vs. just the religious. No brainer really, take a number bishop O'Kiddyfiddler I'll get to you in a moment.

Look this is really, really, simple. Even Galileo said that "I do not believe that a God who gave us reason and intellect intended us to forego their use" so why the fuck are we not using every tool at our disposal to end the misery of the diseases that afflict us. Hells donkeys even the chief rabbi said as much at the weekend (but then the yids always were a practical people who don't really believe in god anyway). I will make it quite clear that if a cure for alzheimers disease ming even remotely be found by dropping fetuses and cute baby seals into a large Kenwood food processor then so be it, get on with it. What is fucking offensive is people being robbed of their brains by a fucking evil disease and a twat of a child molestor in a robe spouting on that it is the will of his invisible friend that this is so, not a bunch of twatting cells in a test tube.

I want a centaur!

Yay! With a firm two fingered salute to the religious, anti-science lobby the HFEA have given their go ahead for the creation of human-animal hybrids.

Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the British Medical Assocition's ethics committee, said it could lead to "major breakthroughs in treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other serious diseases".

Bigger Yay! I've seen up close and personal what those two abominations do to a person and those around them. Get a move on chaps, crank up those Bunsen burners and let's get cracking on sorting out a cure, ideally before I need it.

But biggest yay is the giggles factor at watching the usual suspects writhe and flail about whilst the science world gives them a collective mooning...

Anthony Ozimic, secretary of pro-life group the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) said he "deplored" the HFEA's decision. "This is not just a case of the 'yuk' factor - there are grave ethical and moral objections to this research and the way it is being promoted."

Nothing yuk about it you cunt and even if it was who gives a shit; the only "moral" objections you can come up with basically will boil down to "life belongs to my big invisible friend in the sky and you can't mess with it or he'll smite us all (or more accurately you'll show there's nothing that special about being able to create life and where's my precious faith then?)" And when your hands can't stop shaking and you keep forgetting if you've left the gas on I bet you'll be first in the queue for a syringe full of minotaur stem cells; pious twats like you always are (I refer the reader to my Mother Teresa post earlier)

And Josephine Quintavalle, of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said ... "Using hybrid embryos has never been acceptable - it offends the dignity of humans and animals."

Oh just fuck off you piece of shit. Look as soon as you stop wearing leather and adopt a vegan diet then you can start talking to me about the dignity of animals. Tell you what offends the dignity of humans you leprous dick, a once proud and strong man who's motor control is so shot he can't even wipe his own arse, who can't remember who his loving wife of 50 years is any more and who weeps constantly in pain and frustration; THAT offends human dignity you utterly despicable turd, not a few cells in test tube.

Today has been a good day. Progress marches on and the brass band just started playing a quicker tune.

So where do I sign to order a centaur?

My brain hurts

I've been on a course this week called "Very Hard Sums for Dragons", well OK its really a course of derivatives pricing theory but it basically consists of hard sums - the piccy at the top of this post is one of the more sedate examples. It's been interesting though and I'm getting to use mathematics I haven't done since my university days when I used to do a lot of sums like that and harder to build models for solving fluid dynamics problems (modelling seawater intrusions into freshwater aquifers if you're interested).

It did get me to thinking though, especially as I've been chatting with a few religious types recently, why people still continue to believe in the crap churches of every stripe pump out when it is clear to anyone who really cares to string a bit of logic together that the evidence for a god who (a) created everything and (b) listens to what you say and (c) intervenes in your life is on a par with the likelihood of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH) living in my stables.

Now I'm aware of the current ideas of self-replicating memes, of religion being a "misfiring impulse" of a trait that is or was useful to us in our evolutionary past I'm going to postulate another one.

Science is inherently hard to understand and it gets harder the closer you look. Trust me those sums at the top of this post are an absolute doddle when you start mucking about into quantum theory; when you get to it there are probably only a handful of people on the planet who really fully understand what actually happened in the first femtosecond of the universe and why. When you combine this with seeming contradictions like an electron being both a particle and a wave and never knowing exactly where it is then it's easy for a person with a religious predisposition to dismiss much of science as just as unbelievable as their own "faith" in a invisible, omnipotent God so they might as well stick with what they know.

This is however an error. You can join in the science side if you want, it'll take some effort and to really, really understand it you're going to have to learn a lot about maths, physics and a whole host of other disciplines but you can start small; maybe read that book by Steven Hawkins or something. The thing is that you can participate and see that the logic works and even if you can't devote the twenty odd years it'll take you to get that astrophysics PhD you'll at least be on the way; you'll also have confidence that, because of the scientific method, that what the clever handful are telling you about the origins of the universe will be as correct as it's possible to be because a whole host of people have spent their lives trying to pick holes in what these guys and girls are saying; it's called "peer review". There's simply no way you can do the same with religion, you have to take what you are given on faith alone as religions assertions are impossible to prove using logic and reason. You have to go on faith alone, what someone tells you to believe, you can't participate because when you look at the faith critically and try and apply reason it doesn't work.

It all takes work however and it's probably unsettling to have to do all that questioning and so I think a lot of people, especially if they're not too bright or well educated, prefer to stay in the comfort zone of a religious faith that was handed down to them in childhood. "I'll never understand this science, all those equations scare me; better stick with my invisible friend."

Just an idle thought on the train home this evening. Comments from god-botherers welcome as ever.