Brighton going Green?
Feb 5th
I’m quite excited about this General Election thing. For one thing, struggling to overcome my very British apathy and cynicism, I’m beginning to find politics vaguely interesting. And I find myself in one of the most interesting constituencies for the coming election. A Conservative stronghold from its creation in 1950 until 1997, the Brighton Pavilion seat was gained by Labour in 1997. With the current MP due to retire, many people consider the frontrunner to be Caroline Lucas MEP, the leader of the Green Party. And, for the first time ever for a UK parliamentary seat, the shortlist is going to be all female, with the four major parties all fielding female candidates. Here’s a video about the situation from the Guardian’s Comment is free pages:
Initial results from Herschel
Dec 17th
A bigger venue now, for the first scientific results from the Herschel Space Observatory. Not sure how much I can reveal right now (the presentations will be uploaded after the conference, and I think they might be embargoed until then) but the photo above gives you the general idea. In the corner you can just about see the figure of Göran Pilbratt, the Herschel Project Scientist (who refused to stand still for the 8-second exposure), and on the screen he is dazzling us with an overview of the mission.
However, some results were revealed yesterday at a press briefing, and here they are…
Buenos días from Madrid!
Dec 14th
Day 1 of the Herschel Science Demonstration Phase Data Processing Workshop. Until Wednesday we will be based at ESAC, some 20 miles or so outside Madrid (map here). In the photo (click to enlarge) you can see ISO, Herschel’s predecessor, at the left (well, a scale model of it!), and the ruins of a 15th Century castle at the right.
Today: update on the status of the mission, the instruments and the data processing software. This afternoon we’ll be demonstrating the SPIRE photometry pipeline and I’ll be rounding the day off with a brief demonstration of the point source extraction tool. If that made no sense to you, here’s a layman’s description: Herschel makes pictures of thousands of distant galaxies where each galaxy looks like a blob, and the tool automatically spots the blobs and measures how bright they are. And by spotting, counting and measuring blobs, we can learn about how stars formed in the early Universe. Exciting stuff!
Off to Madrid
Dec 12th
Just back from a week at RAL developing software related to the Herschel Space Observatory. I’ll be off again tomorrow, this time to Madrid for a big Herschel conference hosted by ESA(C), where a bunch (a galaxy?) of astronomers will get together to share their brand-new expertise in analysing the brand-new Herschel data (from Monday-Wednesday) before the really exciting bit (Thursday and Friday), when the initial (tentative!) results from the science teams will be presented to the world.
I may post some updates during the week, and I’m sure there will be plenty on the Herschel blog, but for now here are a couple of pictures from a visit to Madrid last December, when I discovered the joys of photo stitching (with Hugin).
First, here’s the Madrid Atocha railway station (spot the trains):
And here’s the Puerto del Sol:
Free speech
Nov 12th
Photo by lewishamdreamer
As a Bible-believing Christian, I am deeply committed to freedom of expression and to tolerance (for example, of those with whom I deeply disagree).
I’m talking about the freedom to believe something, and the freedom to express those beliefs – of course, with the proviso that those beliefs are not expressed with the intention to threaten, to cause abuse or to incite violence or any other criminal activity.
But it seems I am in a minority. Certainly I would be, in the House of Commons. The House of Lords previously secured the place of a “free speech” clause in the legislation for the recently-introduced homophobic hatred offence (an amendment tabled by Lord Waddington). This has been vigourously opposed by the Government, who are now trying to remove this clause. Here is the wording the Government finds so objectionable:
In this Part, for the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred.
From the government’s determined efforts to remove these words from the statute books, one may conclude that the Government would like it to be the case that if I merely express the belief that certain sexual conduct is wrong, then that may, of itself, be taken to be a “hate crime”.
Just think for a moment about what this means. Does no one believe in freedom of speech any more? Sure, my beliefs may be utterly repugnant, but should it be illegal for me to discuss them with anyone? Seriously?
Thank God for our unelected representatives in the House of Lords, who at least seem to believe in democracy and freedom of expression. But if the government has its way, we’re certainly going to see more cases like this and this.
What do you think? Is freedom of speech worth fighting for? Or are there some beliefs that are so obnoxious that it should be illegal to express them, under any circumstances?
Stand up for research
Nov 5th
The UK government appears to be under the impression that it should preferentially fund scientific research that has direct economic value. This, of course, is rubbish. Industry should preferentially fund scientific research that has direct economic value, because, well, it has direct economic value. The government should fund scientific research that pushes the frontiers of human knowledge, regardless of the direct economic impact.
The Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) is collecting signatures for their Stand up for research campaign, related to this very issue. Follow the link to sign up…
Gmail on Apple Mail
Oct 3rd
Well, Sussex University email is hopelessly (yes, hopelessly) broken this weekend, so now seems a good time to switch to a proper email provider for my primary account.
Gmail seems to be the best of the bunch by far, offering IMAP and an excellent webmail interface, free of charge. (Yahoo won’t give you IMAP access, and Hotmail … enough said!) I’m using Apple Mail on the Mac, and setup was easy, thanks to some helpful instructions on Geekology (I didn’t use the “IMAP Path Prefix” bit though). A few very minor issues (such as the way many messages appear twice or several times when you seach in “All Mailboxes”), but I’m very happy so far. Except that I still have 191 messages waiting to be dealt with, plus however many are sitting in a queue (I hope!) at Sussex…
Freecycle Brighton recycled?
Sep 12th
I’ve been using Freecycle Brighton for a few years now. Since I blogged about it in 2006, I’ve successfully used it to get rid of an upright piano, a table or two, a printer, an old drum kit, around 100 chairs, a fridge, a sofa and a few bookcases, as well as obtaining and subsequently getting rid of a bed or two. No idea how I managed to accumulate that much stuff.
Anyway, it seems that Freecycle has not been free from power-hungry leadership, and now the UK groups and moderators seem to be escaping from the heavy-handed control of the Freecycle overlord(s) in the USA.
Or that’s the impression I get from the report in the Guardian, particularly the comments section. More on the Freecycling blog and on the Brighton Freecycle Cafe group…
FreecycleBrighton has worked spectacularly well, but it seems to have suffered a possibly serious blow. The Yahoo! group has been closed down by the moderators, and group members were directed to GreenCycleSussex as the new group. At the last count, this has 494 members. But of the 16,000(?) former FreecycleBrighton members, those 3000 or so who signed up through the “official” Freecycle page are still there, freecycling away, quite possibly unaware of all the rumblings that have taken place. And other groups are springing up, such as freebrighton.
Similar action is being taken by many UK Freecycle groups, reconvening under the name Freegle.
All a bit of a mess really. I’m minded to go with the Green Cycle Sussex group for now, out of principle. But if that doesn’t work out, then I might (very reluctantly) succumb to the official group, this time out of a different principle.
Update 21 Sep 2009: the Freecycle Brighton group page (also available as www.freebrighton.org) now states explicitly that it is “no longer affiliated with the US freecycle network”.
Update 8 Oct 2009: following legal pressure from “The Freecycle Network (TM)”, the Freecycle Brighton Yahoo! group has now been renamed FreeBrighton.
How to vote ethically
Aug 26th
I know nothing about politics. Okay, I know what I think about a few controversial moral issues, but the rest – the other 99% or so – is a complete mystery to me.
But I’m glad I’m not alone, as Joseph Bloggs demonstrates in this promotional video for the Jubilee Centre’s new book, Votewise Now!
Evangelicals Now: singing and tweeting
Jul 30th
Well, it’s been almost two months since my last update. I suppose if this were a blog, that would be unacceptable.
Anyway, I still don’t have anything interesting to say, so I’ll have to defer to others.
And, fortunately, some decent articles from Evangelicals Now appeared in my Bloglines feeds this morning.
First, Richard Simkin has some helpful thoughts about congregational singing:
We must get rid of the idea that bands, organists or choirs provide the music for churches. Instead, it’s the congregation which makes up the choir that sings praises to God — the congregation is the main provider of the music that reaches God’s ears (and that we hope pleases him). Musicians may facilitate congregational singing, but that’s all we do.
Then James Cary puts Twitter in perspective:
What is this web-based fad doing and showing us about ourselves? It demonstrates a longing for community and friendship. … We inflate our sense of self-importance and consider ourselves to be something of a celebrity. … For those of us who tweet, or use Facebook, it is worth considering what kind of person we are presenting. Is it the real us?
That’s enough for today. For those of you following my celebrity life, a link to this post should soon appear on my Twitter page.
Simon Singh sued
Jun 5th
Chiropractic is all about manipulating the spine to cure various ailments. It’s all over the news at the moment because of something Simon Singh wrote in the Guardian last April:
You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact they still possess some quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything. And even the more moderate chiropractors have ideas above their station. The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.
I can confidently label these treatments as bogus because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.
In response to this, the British Chiropractic Association drew attention to the huge number of careful clinical trials that have demonstrated the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment has taken Simon Singh to court to sue him for libel. If you think this is a tad silly, click here to join the Sense About Science campaign.
Six days and counting
May 8th
Herschel (on the left) and Planck (on the right) are scheduled for launch at 2.12pm UK time this coming Thursday…
Credit: ESA
At Sussex we’re busy getting ready for data from both Herschel and Planck, but it’ll be a few months before they reach that distant location known as L2, where they’ll start their proper survey observations. So, in the meantime, here are some links…
- ESA launch page
- Another ESA launch page
- Watch the launch live on the Arianespace webcast page or on the ESA webcast page
John Cleese explains the God gene
Apr 17th
David Robertson on secular belief and society
Mar 22nd
David Robertson, author of The Dawkins Letters, is due to visit Brighton in June/July. Yesterday he was on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? programme, discussing the place of rationality, belief, progress and tolerance in a secular society, along with atheist blogger Adrian Hayter and Ariane Sherine, creator of the Atheist Bus Campaign. The fascinating conversation may he heard on the Unbelievable? page, on MP3, via the Podcast feed or on iTunes.
Film discussion: Iron Man (2008)
Mar 1st
Just back from a film discussion at my church, at which we watched Iron Man (2008) and then used the following questions to delve under the surface of this deeply philosophical film:
- Which character did you like the most?
- Iron Man is a superhero story. Does this kind of story appeal to you? Why?
- Do you think people in our society are looking for a superhero, or is it just a story that we tell?
- Listen to these two quotes
- Tony Stark: “I don’t want this winding up in the wrong hands. Maybe in mine, it can actually do some good.”
- Obadiah Stane: “How ironic, Tony! Trying to rid the world of weapons, you gave it its best one ever!”
If there was a real Iron Man, do you think that would help in ridding the world of weapons?
- Some people think that the stories we tell about a superhero who saves the world actually become real in Jesus. Why might people think that Jesus is the real superhero? Why might they think he isn’t?
- How did Tony Stark and Pepper Potts’s relationship develop through the film?
- Obadiah Stane said this to Pepper Potts: “Tony never really did come home, did he? He left a part of himself in that cave.” How would you compare Stark before and after his time in the cave? What effect did Yinsen have on Stark?
- Who or what do you think is the real enemy in the film?
Are we alone in the Universe?
Feb 16th
After “Do you want to be the next Patrick Moore?” and “I’m a Capricorn”, the most common response I get when I tell people I work in astronomy is, “Do you think there is life on other planets?” Apparently, according to a talk given by Alan Boss to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago, the answer should be “Yes”:
If you have a habitable world that is sitting around for four, five or ten billion years around a star, how are you going to stop it from forming life? It’s like taking a refrigerator, unplugging it, shutting the door and then coming back a couple of months later; you’d be amazed to find what’s growing there. … That’s what life’s like. The fridge analogy may not be the same as the origins of life, but life is so tenacious, it’s hard to stop. If you had a planet sitting there at the right temperature with water for a million years, something’s going to come out of it.
The theory of spontaneous generation is alive and well, it seems.
But how many planets have actually formed life? Being extremely simplistic, we could express it as follows:
where 
is the number of planets that have formed life, 
is the probability that a planet will form life, given that it is a habitable planet, and 
is the number of habitable planets. So if there are 100 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, and 
, then we can expect that 1 billion planets in our Galaxy have formed life (whether they would still harbour life today is a different question).
isn’t too difficult to guess, in principle. But if we want to estimate , we need to find . This is more tricky.
One approach is to create life in the laboratory, and then estimate how long it would take for the same processes to take place outside the laboratory. Now, I freely admit that I know almost nothing about current research in this area, except that life has not yet been created in a laboratory. And until it has, we need to proceed in a different way.
The other approach is to estimate given what we know about the existence of life on Earth. Let’s assume for the moment that we know 
, the time it took for life to appear on Earth. This is generally estimated to be perhaps a few hundred million years. Then we assume that for Earth is fairly typical for habitable planets, and then it’s pretty easy to find the result we’re looking for.
But there are a few serious (really serious!) problems with this approach. For example:
- Who says that is a fairly typical length of time? Why is life arising on Earth after however many million years necessarily typical? Maybe it’s extremely unusual. We could even ask this: What part of “planet Earth formed life after ” is inconsistent with life being so improbable that it would not have arisen more than once in the entire Universe?
- How are we supposed to factor out our own existence? This is the issue of anthropic bias in the Drake equation. Why is it reasonable to assume that Earth is a typical habitable planet? Was it chosen at random? Of course not. So when we find for Earth, that is not for any old habitable planet, but for a habitable planet that is home to intelligent life. Why should
, the probability distribution for for habitable planets in general, be the same as 
, the probability distribution of for habitable planets that are (or will become) the home for intelligent life forms, such as our own? - How are we supposed to know that the Earth has ever formed life anyway? Many people believe that life was created by a supernatural being. What scientific experiment could we conduct to distinguish between the two hypotheses, H1, “Life on earth arose from non-living substances by ordinary physical processes”, and H2, “Life on earth was specially created by a divine being”? In order to put a figure on , we have to assume H1, but this not established empirically.
In summary, while there are often good reasons to be optimistic about the number of planets that support life (e.g., to gain funding and/or publicity for your pet project), I would err on the side of caution and argue that we don’t have a clue – scientifically – how many planets have formed life.
Discuss!
Peter Hitchens on equality and diversity
Feb 9th
Commenting on the scandal of nurse Caroline Petrie offering to pray for a patient, Peter Hichens made this observation:
After an earlier incident she was told that the ‘Nursing & Midwifery Council code’ states that ‘you must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’ and ‘you must not use your professional status to promote causes not related to health’.
These are amazing statements, both sinister and self-contradictory. She must promote Left-wing politics, but she must not mention Christianity.
Equality (alias Marxism) and Diversity (alias political correctness) are contentious and highly political aims, not at all ‘related to health’. Yet she ‘must’ be personally and professionally committed to them.
Is atheism compatible with belief in evolution?
Feb 3rd
Perhaps not.
Have a read of this extract from Alvin Plantinga’s entry on Religion and Science in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (dealt with at more length here):
In crafting our cognitive faculties, natural selection will favor cognitive faculties and processes that result in adaptive behavior; it cares not a whit about true belief (as such) or about cognitive faculties that reliably give rise to true belief. … What our minds are for (if anything) is not the production of true beliefs, but the production of adaptive behavior: that our species has survived and evolved at most guarantees that our behavior is adaptive; it does not guarantee or even make it likely that our belief-producing processes are for the most part reliable, or that our beliefs are for the most part true. That is because our behavior could perfectly well be adaptive, but our beliefs false as often as true. Darwin himself apparently worried about this question: “With me,” says Darwin, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Darwin 1887) …
Now naturalism entails that evolution, if it occurs, is indeed unguided. But then, so the suggestion goes, it is unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given the conjunction of naturalism with the proposition that we and our cognitive faculties have come to be by way of natural selection winnowing random genetic variation. If so, one who believes that conjunction will have a defeater for the proposition that our faculties are reliable—but if that’s true, she will also have a defeater for any belief produced by her cognitive faculties—including, of course, the conjunction of naturalism with evolution. That conjunction is thus seen to be self-refuting. If so, however, this conjunction cannot rationally be accepted, in which case there is conflict between naturalism and evolution …
The government shall be upon his shoulders
Jan 22nd
NT Wright, speaking on Christmas Eve:
‘Unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulders.’ [Isaiah 9] Unless you sigh with relief at those words, you haven’t really been listening. What we need just now, more obviously than ever in my lifetime, is someone to shoulder the burden, someone who can get under, pick up our multiple problems and carry them for us.
It should be obvious by now that nobody locally or globally has the slightest idea how to address, let alone solve, the crisis that has come swiftly upon us. And I’m not simply talking about the voting methods in Strictly Come Dancing. I’m talking about those admittedly lesser concerns, the problems of global power, global finance, global humanity as a whole.
We have of course just witnessed a kind of secular version of Isaiah 9. The election of Barack Obama has been hailed with wild delight around the world. … The whole world was hungry for hope, and now Obama, who is indeed brilliant, charming, shrewd and very capable, is being told that the government of the world is upon his shoulders, and we expect him to solve its problems. Poor man: no ordinary mortal can bear that burden. Nor should we ask it of him. The irrational joy and hope at his election only shows the extent to which other hopes have failed, making us snatch too eagerly at sudden fresh signs. And that can only be because we have forgotten the Christmas message, or have neutered it, have rendered it toothless, as though the shoulder of the child born this night was simply a shoulder for individuals to lean on rather than the shoulder to take the weight of the world’s government.
Because this night, together with its senior cousin, the night of Easter, is the real night for which planet earth was waiting and to which it must look back if it wants to know the way forward. We place too much trust in our politicians because we place too little trust in God, and in the self-revelation of the living God in the child who is born to us. And when our politicians let us down, all we can think of is … how to find another politician, who will get it right this time. …
Jesus isn’t simply another politician on whom everyone can pin their hopes and who will then let them down. His way of establishing God’s justice and peace on the earth was different to Caesar’s, different to the usual power games and money games, different in source, different in method, different in effect. We are today hungry for exactly that difference, and Christmas night is the time to ponder it. …
And Isaiah cries out, and Luke in his spectacular Christmas story cries out too, that it’s time for a different kind of world, a different kind of empire. What we need is a new economic system, a new way of doing global politics, a new style of leadership. That’s what the Christmas message is all about: ‘Unto us a child is born, a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulders. And his name shall be called, Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’ Christmas is all about the coming of the world’s true king, the one who stops wars, who forgives debts, who establishes true justice and judgment in the earth.
I am a research fellow in 
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Haiti in The Onion
Jan 29th
Posted by Anthony in Comment
No comments
The Onion – “America’s Finest [satirical] News Source” – light-hearted, harmless, chuckle chuckle, how amusing, better get back to work now. Not this piece. This is proper satire: deadly, incisive, revealing, convicting. Here, read it yourself: Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti’.