Certainly, master!

Right, how am I going to turn these quirky little stories into a feature-length film? That could be a challenge…  Films usually have a plot…  Hmm…

Hold on, what have we here?  “Instant Film!  Simply add characters and special effects!”  Ah, this could do the trick!  Which flavour shall I use?  How about this one: “Vanilla Epic Flavour. Evil ruler in control, good ruler in hiding, only a champion fighting an evil monster to the death can release the people from their suffering, enter champion, told of destiny, unsure of identity at first, recover magic weapon, go to battle, fight, win, people free, all live happily ever after.”

Sounds promising, but I’m not sure – an epic battle between the forces of good and evil doesn’t sound even remotely like Alice in Wonderland!  No, I’m really going to have to think about this a bit harder… Hold on – what’s this on the packaging?  “Fed up of making new plots with every film?  That’s a thing of the past with Instant Film!  All you have to do is add the other ingredients and then a blockbuster is guaranteed!”

Right, that’s settled. I’ll just chop up these old Lewis Carroll books, and stir them into the “Vanilla Epic Flavour Instant Film”, and see what happens.  Okay, let’s get started. I suppose Alice will be the champion. The evil ruler? Queen of Hearts. What about the evil monster? Let’s see … Mr Jabberwocky, can you do that?  Thank you. Who’s next in line? Ah, the Cheshire Cat …

L’Abri ideas library

And here’s a picture of the English L’Abri, in Hampshire.

I had almost got used to this – part of the initiation rite as a Mac devotee – but now I have two machines on my desk at work, with different keyboard layouts, so it’s driving me pretty crazy. Enough is enough. Real Mac UK Keyboard Layout (hat tip: Greg Knapp).

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…

• OSHI – Online Showcase of Herschel Images
• Inside the dark heart of the Eagle
• Reported on the BBC News website

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!

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:

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?

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 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…

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.

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!

Master Your Mind: How to vote ethically

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.

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.

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

Hat tip: Paul Garner

1. Which character did you like the most?
2. Iron Man is a superhero story. Does this kind of story appeal to you?  Why?
3. Do you think people in our society are looking for a superhero, or is it just a story that we tell?
4. 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?

5. 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?
6. How did Tony Stark and Pepper Potts’s relationship develop through the film?
7. 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?
8. Who or what do you think is the real enemy in the film?

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:

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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!