the greycat blog

The BBC does clearly think I am an idiot, as only an idiot would want the tide of mindless drivel, the murrain of talentless overpaid jerkwads, the torrent of shameless self-promotion and the flatulence of worthless non-news that now composes the promo-infested ego-stroking bias-spewing mess that is the Corporation’s output. And yes, I pay them £139.50 a year for this, but then I have no choice: it’s extorted out of me by the BBC’s money-with-menaces outfit, TV Licensing.

Anyway, what brought on these bitter reflections was a fascinating post at the Layscience Blog revealing the true depths of feeble-minded fatuity that lay behind Big Bang Day, the hysterically hyped-up coverage of the ’switching on’ (which was nothing of the kind) of the Large Hadron Collider with which the BBC bored the nation’s backside off in September, apparently under the impression that this represented serious science reporting. In a classic BBC beyond-parody moment, it turns out they even wanted the LHC team to fit a special Big Red Button that would be pressed at the crucial moment.

By the way, I have nothing against the Large Hadron Collider, which is a marvellous thing. And guess what, it didn’t destroy us all by creating a black hole capable of swallowing the universe (nor even one capable of swallowing the BBC, alas).

There’s a review of Alan Sokal’s latest book on his infamous hoax by philosopher Simon Blackburn in a recent National Review which is freely available via the Powell’s Books website. It is an interesting article, for three two reasons (not including its gratuitous and reflexive anti-Americanism, which is not interesting).

First, he puts the case for the importance of a historical, cultural and social understanding of science very well: ‘the reality is that science is a human activity, not an abstract calculus, and this properly makes its great achievements a subject of pride and awe, not suspicion and skepticism. It should also make us aware of its desperate fragility, and the hostile cultural forces that it constantly has to overcome’. There are scientists who reject any notion that putting science in its historical context as a human activity is helpful at all. As Blackburn argues, they are wrong, not least because such framing is their ally in resisting science-hostile forces, not a fifth column seeking to undermine science from within.

Second, he does precisely what he argues many postmodern critics of science have done, and dodges the central issue of the evidence-based nature of scientific claims. As he says, science describes the world, and its descriptions correspond to reality: ‘Our lasers and our cell phones work, our materials have their calculated strengths, our predictions are borne out to extraordinary numbers of decimal places: what can explain this, except that we are getting things right, or very nearly right? Or in other words, that we are on the track of the truth? If we were not, it would be an inexplicable coincidence — a miracle — that we are so often so successful’. He then goes on to say that science doesn’t often talk about ‘truth’. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t have to. It talks about evidence. Scientific predictions about the world are attested by evidence, over and over again. The status of scientific assertions about the world as ‘truth’ derives from their status as evidence-based. Blackburn’s failure to see this point devalues the rest of his argument, as he goes on to prove by producing the term ‘uniformities’. Light, or water, or carbon behaving in the same way under given conditions becomes a ‘uniformity’:

The word ‘faith’ raises its annoying head at this point. [No it doesn’t. Why would it? Faith exists outside of evidence, science depends entirely upon evidence.] Is the human reliance on uniformities just as much a matter of faith as the creationist’s reliance on whatever message tells him that the earth is six thousand years old? [Not if those ‘uniformities’ are tested against the evidence and pass the test every time.] A lot of modern writing in the theory of knowledge more or less throws in the towel and supposes that it is. Wittgenstein summed it up in his last book, On Certainty, arguing that what we would like are rock-solid foundations for our beliefs, but what we find are things that simply ’stand fast’ for us — and this raises the disturbing possibility of others for whom different and in our eyes deplorable things equally stand fast.

If those ‘different … things’ are in the realm of metaphysics then there is not much you can do to prove them right or wrong - which is precisely why they are unscientific and cannot be considered as equivalent in status to scientific claims about the world. If someone turns up on my doorstep arguing that God the Son has not existed through eternity and was created by God the Father as a separate being I could neither prove nor disprove his assertion; I would have to close the door, muttering ‘gosh, the Arian heresy’. If, however, he asserted that human beings can breathe water as effectively as air, I could bring him in and drown him in the bath. Blackburn’s ‘uniformities’ aren’t just out there in the realm of ultimately unverifiable assertion: they make a difference.

[Third point redacted. It was pedantic, snarky and worthless.]

In case you weren’t aware of the background to yesterday’s news that a group of Muslim scientists and clerics want a global time based on Mecca to replace GMT, two invaluable videos available at YouTube present the cutting-edge Islamic science underlying the Mecca Time movement. They both feature Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid, a scientific luminary from the Egyptian National Research Centre.

The first video, ‘Science in Islam: Mecca is the centre of the world’, is from Al-Majd TV, Saudi Arabia, and dates from 16 January 2005. Highlights of this discussion include the claim that the Ka’ba emits short-wave radiation, that ‘this radiation is infinite’, and that this is why anyone living in Mecca or travelling there will live long, be healthier, and be ‘less affected by Earth’s gravity’. The existence of the ‘zero-magnetism zone’ halfway between the north and south poles ‘where the pull is equal from both sides’ is also considered: ‘the magnetic force has no effect there’.

The companion piece to this is ‘Science in Islam: Mecca Time must replace GMT’ from Mihwar TV, Egypt, recorded on 26 December 2006, in which Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid expounds the benefits of Mecca Time. In Greenwich the magnetic field is 8.5 degrees, while in Mecca ‘the magnetic field is zero’. This means that when time is measured from Greenwich there is a discrepancy of 8.5 minutes ‘between the northern and southern hemispheres’. ‘Air traffic’, warns the doc darkly, ‘cannot be organized in this way’. There’s also a lot of fascinating information about blood, circulation, magnetic force, and why circling the Ka’ba will fill you with energy (clue: it’s all about going from right to left).

Such is the world of modern Islamic science, in which religious fundamentalism meets Time Cube. You infidels are educated stupid, not comprehend the zero-magnetism Mecca Time truth of Earth-centre infinite radiation wisdom.

Even the time must submit. ‘Muslim scientists and clerics’ want the world to adopt Mecca Time, reports the BBC:

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. … The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

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

Some geologist. (1) Magnetic north is constantly on the move. (2) The line of longitude upon which Mecca is situated also passes through, for example, the Russian cities of Yaroslavl, Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, so presumably those places (along with others in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Kenya …) would have equal claim to whatever divinely-ordained distinction is claimed for Mecca. (3) There are also alignments of the earth’s magnetic field where magnetic north and true north are the same, but such lines are not equivalent to lines of longitude and anyway Mecca isn’t on one.

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.

I find the notion of Royal Navy battleships circling the globe coercing people into setting their watches according to British diktat rather appealing, but it didn’t really work like that. GMT was adopted as a standard by consent, not imposed by force. Perhaps the distinction between the two is not well understood in Islam.

According to the Gulf Times’s report on this gathering of dunces, a man called Yasin a-Shouk has invented an Islamic watch that runs anti-clockwise. If the standard of scientific knowledge on display at this conference is any guide, the symbolism is appropriate: for Islam, intellectually at least, time does indeed run backwards.

[P.S. How long are pious Muslims going to permit this infidel organization to go on associating the name of the Holy City with commercialism, gambling, and garish decor?]

Admirers of Gene Wolfe’s epic fantasy of the far future The Book of the New Sun will recall the guild cloak worn by the central character and narrator, the torturer Severian: not black but fuligin, the colour darker than black. ‘I’ve never seen such black - so dark you can’t see folds in it. It makes my hand look as though it’s disappeared’. Then there’s Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album with its all-black cover: ‘How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black’. And we musn’t forget what Father Ted taught us about the special blackness of priest’s socks, which are blacker than any other type of socks. ‘Sometimes you see lay people wear what look like black socks but if you look closely you’ll see they’re very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue’.

Anyway, the point of this is that fuligin has now been invented; a substance of which ‘none more black’ can honestly be said has arrived; the truly, perfectly black priest’s sock is now possible at last. Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have used carbon nanotubes to create ‘the darkest man-made material ever’. According to Imperial College theoretical physicist Sir John Pendry, ‘they’ve made the blackest material known to science’.  Next stop: superdark materials. Which are apparently even darker.

Here’s a web-based scholarly resource that had somehow evaded my notice until now: the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Index, neatly abbreviated (with obligatory capital letter in the middle) as the SciPer index. Here’s what it is and what it does, in its own words:

The Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) Index provides a scholarly synopsis of the material relating to science, technology, and medicine appearing in sixteen general periodicals published in Britain between 1800 and 1900. With entries describing over 14,000 articles and references to more than 6000 individuals and 2500 publications, it provides an invaluable research tool for those interested in the representation of science and in the interpenetration of science and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as for students of the period more generally. […]

Constructed by systematically reading runs of sixteen non-scientific titles, [the index] provides details of the scientific references occurring throughout the periodicals, whether in fiction, poetry, illustrations, or dedicated scientific articles. The index has been compiled by experienced nineteenth-century researchers, whose judgement in identifying non-trivial references, and in identifying the people, publications, and institutions to whom reference is made, makes the finished product both more inclusive than conventional indexes, and more incisive than full-text searching. Although the index inevitably represents only a small proportion of the material available, a wide range of periodical formats and genres is represented. The indexing is very detailed, including not only the authors, titles, and bibliographical details of articles with relevant references, but also references to people, institutions, and publications mentioned, and in many cases a more extended description.

The SciPer index is very easy to use, with a sound basic search facility and an advanced search feature that provides almost every option you could wish for (although it would be nice to be able to exclude specific periodicals from the results; one can have too much of Punch). The periodicals indexed are listed here and include Blackwood’s, Cornhill, Edinburgh Review and the European Harper’s.

The recent expansion in the availability of full-text electronic resources has, if anything, increased the need for this kind of detailed and focused scholarly indexing, as the creators of SciPer observe: ‘full-text searching threatens to overwhelm the student with unwanted hits. Furthermore, both conventional indexing and digital full-texts have tended to leave illustrative material difficult to locate’. SciPer fills that gap and for anyone working on Victorian STM constitutes an invaluable resource.

A mere two months after it was featured in The Guardian (and right here on this blog), the Zerefos et al analysis of paintings depicting sunsets between 1500 and 1900 has turned up on the Discovery Channel’s news pages: ‘Art as a window to climate change’.

The article quotes some skeptical responses to the Zerefos approach from, among others, Kevin Trenberth of the Climate Analysis Research Center, who points out that ‘Painters are not scientists trying to do an accurate picture of nature’, and James Hamilton, biographer of J. M. W. Turner, who comments that ‘It’s very hard to tell when artists are being absolutely accurate and when they’re using vivid sky as a platform to more vivid painting’.

I agree with those reservations, and have my own doubts about the study, which I noted in my original post, but it’s still an interesting approach and, if nothing else, provides some illuminating insights into the interaction between artists and nature (however they saw that nebulous concept) over a long period. This is a direct link to the Zerefos article (PDF) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, August 2007.

Brothels struggle, mountains grow, cats invade, sheep shrink, ice sheets expand, ice sheets contract. Yes, it is just as we feared: global warming has run entirely out of control and is now causing everything.

For all the above hotness calamities and many more (600 or so, in fact) visit Dr John Brignell’s ‘complete list of things caused by global warming’. And while you’re at Dr Brignell’s site, take a little time before the coming eco-catastrophe to read his ‘Global Warming as Religion and not Science’.

My favourite piece of warmy-alarmism: ‘Climate change “could be fashion disaster”‘. Example here.

Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year (gosh), is constantly on the look-out for signs of global warming’s terrible effects. As a result he finds them, all the time, and sometimes in the most surprising places:

The Samburu circumcise their youths in grand ceremonies, which are held every seven years or so, when enough cattle and other foods have accumulated to support such celebrations. Circumcision represents a transition to manhood, and until a youth has passed it he can’t marry. But it’s been 14 years since a circumcision ceremony has been held here. There are now 40,000 uncircumcised young men, some in their late 20s, waiting their turn. All of the eligible young women, tired of waiting, have married older men (multiple wives are allowed), so there are no wives for the new initiates.

I could never have imagined that climate change would have such an effect on an entire society. On reflection though, cultures such as the Samburu are intimately linked to their environment, so as these pressures increase it becomes more difficult to maintain long-held traditions.

I can’t sleep for thinking about those 40,000 foreskins, just left hanging around. For more on the Flannery phenomenon, Tim Blair is your man: try this Google search of his blog.

‘Conservationists’, writes Peter Wilson in The Australian, ‘are questioning the value of protecting “celebrity animals” such as pandas and tigers’. He reports on the views of Chris Packham, a British conservationist, who is arguing that we should get beyond our obsession with the cute and cuddly (pandas), the glamorous and exciting (tigers) and the big and blubbery (whales) and take a more pragmatic view of how the conservation movement/industry best spends its money. ‘I would eat the last panda if I could have all the money we have spent on panda conservation put back on the table for me to do more sensible things with’, he says; ‘The panda is possibly one of the grossest wastes of conservation money in the last half century’.

The underlying issue behind all this is that conservation is driven by a thoroughly anthropocentric worldview shaped by how we would like the world to be rather than how it actually is: hence the quasi-religious worship of whales and the lack of interest in bugs and bacteria. Extinction is a thoroughly natural process, whereas conservation is the ultimate artificial intervention. As Packham puts it, if current conservation priorities had been applied ‘during the last great global warming, we would probably have been throwing our money at the woolly mammoth instead of doing things that might actually work’.

A very interesting chap, Chris Packham. His website is here.