The worst abusers are those who deny they’re doing it. After this you won’t be able to deny what you are doing any more. We’re all guilty of this abuse, and we’ll suffer for it if we don’t stop. And what is this abuse? What we are all jointly doing to the world’s beautiful oceans.
The oceans regulate our climate. They produce most of our oxygen. They feed us-or rather they did until we overfished. Now we dump in millions of tonnes of plastic and even more horrible pollutants. Our massive global warming is turning the seas acid, and natural treasures like The Great Barrier Reef are bleaching to death. Our lights and industries disrupt the lives of birds and whales.
The first call on intelligent action is to know your problem. This week The Conversation has launched a series called Oceans 21 which is designed to brief all intelligent citizens and give you a starting point. After that, it’s up to you. But we imagine that a number of you have families who need a future -it’s a pretty basic human right, we think. So once again, we say, don’t read this, read The Conversation and its series below. Oh-and they have some great pictures!
Everyone ‘s going out again to pubs and shops and markets, and telling each other “the vaccines are coming-everything will be alright!” As Mr Gary Herbert points out, the sheer amount of slog, not only to design, but also test, regulate and distribute your vaccine is truly mind crunching. So before we take it all for granted, as if we were spoiled children, he has tipped us this article by Sam Fazell of Bloomberg which gives some idea of the hours so many superb professionals put in. Thanks.
Nature too have this on the same theme-a bit more of it!
Developing COVID-19 vaccines in record time is an eye-watering accomplishment — but it’s still just the beginning. Hospitals and health workers — who are, in some places, overwhelmed and exhausted — are needed to administer them. Pregnant and breastfeeding women, who make up a significant chunk of health-care and care-home workers, have been left out of clinical trials. Similarly, there are no data on how the front-running vaccines affect children under 12. STAT explores the challenges that must be overcome to make the most of the spectacular scientific achievements of vaccine-makers.STAT | 23 min read
Knowledge is a dangerous thing
So many of us take freedom of enquiry for granted, Yet in some countries being a scientist can cost you your life, if the regime doesn’t like you. Here is the latest instalment in the ongoing saga of Ahmadreza Djalali, who has fallen foul of the regime in Iran. Nature‘s intro and Guardian link says it all-but of you want to help, perhaps your country’s Overseas Ministry (here we call it the Foreign Office) might be pressured.
There’s so few of them about! Particularly in fields like finance, politics and on the internet. If however you want a field guide as to how to spot this rare species. then Cody Porter has some insights in The Conversation
We have always maintained that the chief guarantor of political stability in Britain after the second world war was the twenty-five year mortgage. It produced a new class with a stake in their society; Mrs Thatcher‘s council house sales of the nineteen eighties merely extended the tradition. Now in 2020 our housing market is drawn out to breaking by inequality. A whole new generation of discontented renters is rising, prime material for the attentions of revolutionaries and destabilisers. Here’s Matthew Thompson of The Conversation. And we bet this is not just a British problem either.
In this age of liars and people who keep denying plain facts, we think this quote from the Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, is entirely apposite:
Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.“
We have taken the lines from Wikiquote: Here is the reference
Our thanks this week to an inspiring teacher, mentor, polymath, musician and friend, Mr Mike Mooney
When we asked Mike for a contribution to Friday Night Cocktails, he was forthright:
“There’s only one cocktail for me. One massive measure of vodka, mixed with double that of Big Tom. Yum!”
When we pressed him for a little more detail he replied:
“Big Tom is a spiced tomato juice (RRP £2.69) that has the perfect combination of Worcester sauce, Tabasco, pepper, salt, celery salt and everything else besides. The addition of ice depends on the outside temperature: in summer yes, in winter no.”
We must admit we hadn’t heard of Big Tom until now. But thanks to Mike we have found their fun website and thoroughly recommend its lists of recipes and tales. Including why the Bloody Mary should be stirred with a stick of celery, and many other thoughts and ideas.
Thanks, Michael and a happy weekend to all our thinkers everywhere.
It’s going to be a cold hungry Christmas for a lot of people. Can you help, like Good King Wenceslas did? For younger readers, here is our version of the famous carol:
Good King Wenceslas
Good King Wenceslas last looked out, one night while watching telly
When a poor man came in sight, sad and slightly smelly
It was proper cold that night, he could tell by glancing
I can’t sit here, it just ain’t right, enjoy Strictly Come Dancing
“Bring me flesh and bring me wine, there’s some upstairs, I knew it
ASDA Chardonnay is fine, that should probably do it
Pot noodles and odds and ends are nowhere near enough
As we write these lines, the breaking news this morning is that the UK Government has licenced the Pfizer-BionTec vaccine for national use; it was the first of the three great vaccine breakthroughs. Obviously readers of LSS will hope for the maximum uptake of vaccine in all countries-but. Yes, let’s tread very cautiously here, because if we want to maximum uptake, we will not get there by demonising and making fun of those who are worried or have their doubts.
In a marvellously humane and thoughtful piece for The Conversation, Caitjan Gainty and Agnes Arnold Foster explain why. There are good historical reasons why some people distrust vaccines. Some of it seems to be due to genuinely questionable behaviour by certain large pharmaceutical companies and the CIA. (we shall refrain from including “of course” in that last sentence). Moreover early attempts at vaccination seem to have been accompanied by attempts to reinforce class domination and to humiliate. Don’t demonise, don’t polarise and don’t condemn is the authors’ message.
We think at this point it is relevant to introduce one of the best stories we have ever heard in our lives, for it says so much about human psychology. It took a while to find it again, so we’ll let Karen Pollock of Huffpost tell it for you
Captain Cook famously exploited the power of the ban. He had observed that German sailors suffered from far lower rates of scurvy than English ones. The medical knowledge of the time had no explanation for this (now we know it was caused by vitamin C deficiency). He wondered if it was the German habit of eating sauerkraut, and ordered that his men have a daily ration. When his men refused to eat such strange, foreign food, Cook’s solution was simple. He banned his men from eating the sauerkraut and labelled the barrels “officers use only”. The sauerkraut quickly disappeared and rates of scurvy declined.
There is no better way to make a policy fail than to force it on people. There is no better way to get people interested than to ban something. If you don’t like that, try moving out into the Cosmos and ask to join another species.
Our thanks to Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this story
News that Deep Mind’s AlphaFold programme has solved one of the perennial mysteries of biology has filled us with early festive cheer. Even by the standards of biomolecules, proteins are fiendishly complicated. Tiny changes in structure will utterly ruin them, as anyone who has spilled vinegar into milk will tell you. You can’t just bang a load of amino acids together and hope to get a working molecule to cure diabetes or something. The number of permutations and combinations the pesky little molecules can make is just too big.
Or so it was until now. The sheer power of a trained AI system has at last allowed us to predict the outcomes of building these molecules. Here’s Nature to tell you how important this is
An artificial-intelligence (AI) network developed by Google offshoot DeepMind has made enormous progress in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. The breakthrough is likely to transform biology, say scientists, and should aid in drug design. AlphaFold came out on top, by far, in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. AlphaFold’s predictions are comparable in quality to structures determined experimentally by X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” says evolutionary biologist Andrei Lupas.Nature | 8 min read
Ian Sample of The Guardian tells us a bit about the sorts of applications we might have from this:
Some people will be understandably concerned about systems which are more intelligent than we are running around the planet, and presumably coming into a supermarket near you to buy groceries. To which we say: relax and try to turn down on all this dominance submission stuff! The relationship between humans and their tools has always been symbiotic. The first stone tools let us cut up food better, so soon we didn’t need such big teeth. A short while later the first mobile phones gave you your map, camera, encyclopedia, bank, communications, calculator, games, music and portable drinks mat in your pocket. It’s true we can’t go back to life without them-both our teeth and brains have become too small. But they can’t do without us either – have you ever seen a stone hand axe recharge its own batteries? So it will be with AI, IT, algorithms and all the other potential advances that will change our lives for the better.
When we were young, there was a place in North West England called Windscale. Basically they were in the nuclear fuels business, but it was not a happy few years. They were always dogged by scandals, usually about leaks and however unfairly, they became a bit of by word and a butt. Eventually it was decided to change their name to Sellafield and re-boot their image. Perhaps things have gone better since, or perhaps they have stayed the same. Certainly the name hardly trips off the tongue in the resonant manner of say Cambridge University, The Massachussets Institute of Technology or even Prada.
Names are important and what you call yourself says a lot about you. There is a huge difference for example in a name like Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett Ernle Erle Drax and Aaron Wead, for example. It tells you who you think you are , the sorts of places you hang out, and how highly you rate yourself. (apologies to any bearers of the above names, living or dead- we use them purely as examples, you understand)
So it goes with species. About one and a half million years ago, when humankind was but one species struggling among many, we called ourselves Homo ergaster. It’s a good name. It means working human. It gives the picture of a basically honest, laborious species that bashed out no-nonsense stone tools, brought home the food and were happy enough, it they’d had a good day, to sit around the fire and maybe sing a few songs. (Point of information: downloading was unknown back then) Humble, down to earth with no fancy frills and no self delusion.
Then about 250 000 years ago, along comes someone who recommends that we changed our name to Homo sapiens . The “wise” man. Oh yeah? “oh we’re so clever now, we have dinner parties and art, darling. Making things like tools is so last ice age, we’re a knowledge economy now”. And so it goes.
Look at the results. They are the fruits of vanity. Overpopulation. Ecological and atmospheric catastrophe. Drugs, bizarre sexual practices and drink everywhere (well not absolutely everywhere, but certainly a lot of other people seem to be up to it). Art that you have to pretend is good, even when you know it’s rubbish. Our gardens paved over to give safe havens to millions of metal monsters which congest the cities and run over our pets. And all this why we wait to be replaced by intelligent machines who know a lot more about knowledge economies than we do.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, as the Proverbs would have it. Or was it Ecclesiastes? It doesn’t really matter. The point is to abandon this silly, self-regarding name we have called ourselves and form a Joint International Committee to look for one more befitting to our moral circumstances. How about Homo humilioris, as a starting suggestion?
A genial greeting to you all, gentle readers. Our opportunity, as your most humble and obedient servant, to pick some things you may have missed which we nevertheless think the well educated man or woman about town ought to know about.
Five great reads from Nature
Here’s five, (count ’em, five!) great science books as recommended by Nature. For us the critical read is the one on book burning. When you start attacking knowledge, you are so insecure that you’ll soon move on to people.
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes book-burning through the ages, the Arctic laid bare, and capitalism under scrutiny.
Talking of Capitalism, what will be the economic future of the UK in after Brexit? One view is from Sarah Butler of the Guardian, who predicts quite a revival of old style manufactures including textiles, foodstuffs and DIY hardwares. We would observe: that’s OK as far as it goes- but surely the whole point of both The British Empire and the EU was to give businesses large markets to benefit from economy of scale?
We thank Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire for this story
Why our people are morally superior to terrorists like Usman Khan
If you want to read a story about decent people and their response to the awful terrorist attack at London’s Fishmongers Hall try this piece from The Conversation by Katharina Karcher. Contrast the essential humanity and learned responses of our people with the blind fanaticism of the terrorist. How fitting that in free society, a woman is able to write his dreadful epitaph!
Anyone who had any sort of Biological education back in the nineteen seventies was taught “everything living beings do is all the result of chemical laws acting on genes and molecules”. ” They have no independent, goal seeking concept.” Uber-reductionism in other words. It was convenient to believe that the question was settled-but is it? Here’s a rather profound piece from Philip Ball in Aeon which looks at the matter from the point of view of information physics. If you like to see the apple cart upset, here’s the one for you.
We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this one
We wish to thank our old friend and ever-reliable colleague Sarah McCabe for tonight’s idea
The origins of the Long Island Iced Tea have always been disputed. Was it as a cover for all that funny hooch during Prohibition? Or was it more recent? For the record, this is Wikipedia‘s take:
Robert “Rosebud” Butt claims to have invented the Long Island iced tea as an entry in a contest to create a new mixed drink with triple sec in 1972 while he worked at the Oak Beach Inn on Long Island, New York.
A slightly different drink is claimed to have been invented in the 1920s during Prohibition in the United States by an “Old Man Bishop” in a local community named Long Island in Kingsport, Tennessee. The drink was then perfected by Ransom Bishop, Old Man Bishop’s son. This drink included whiskey and maple syrup, and varied quantities of the five liquors, rather than the modern one with cola and five equal portions of the five liquors.
We post their link below. But, be warned, gentle readers: this is a really strong one! Do not attempt to drive, operate heavy machinery or give legal evidence anytime soon after this lot:
Put six ice cubes into a tall mixing glass. Add HALF measures of each of the following: gin, vodka, white rum, tequila, Cointreau. ONE measure fresh lemon juice. Half teaspoon sugar syrup. Stir and pour into a tall glass, with more cubes. Top up with nice cold Coca cola or Pepsi. (If you choose one, don’t tell the other lot you’ve done it) Decorate with a slice of lemon. Straws if you want.
We take our recipe from Hamlyn’s The Ultimate Cocktail Book. Note that today’s choice does give you the chance to drawl “Stirred, not shaken” in your best James Bond accent. Happy Friday, secret agents everywhere.
Remember the old, old days before the internet, before Wikipedia, when the most advanced learning tool in the house was Microsoft Encarta. Back in ’95 we used to wonder-how do they cram so many words and beautiful images on one little compact disc?
The answer of course is fractals, that amazing branch of learning where geometry and graphic arts meet, and which gives us such insights into nature. Their discovery crept up on us slowly-and they weren’t always welcome. In 1861 fractals pioneer Karl Weierstrass produced the first true fractal, a graph made of zig zags with no straight bits whatsoever. His fellow mathematicians labelled it “pathological”. Fractals didn’t really come into their own until Benoit Mandelbrot harnessed the power of the first really big IBMs in the 1960s -and the rest, as they say, is history.
We’ve got a couple of articles for you to dive into today. Michael Rose in The Conversation has a lovely salesman like piece, breaking them down into properties and possibilities. If you want to dip your toe into the mathematical waters , Craig Haggit over at How Stuff Works has a kindly sampler. For a nice light guide, including how you can never ever measure the coast of Brittany, you might like Fractals for Dummies by Bruno Marion. Wikipedia has some great graphics-enjoy them.
It was fractal technology that makes the mouthpiece in your mobile work. It lets you understand things in nature like ferns and lightning. If you read even one of our links you will never think about dimensions in the same way again-promise. Fractals, Biotechnology and AI are the great triad of the future. However hard you try, the world will never be like it was before they came along.
Learning, Science and Society 