NASA researchers believe they have found bits of ancient stars in small particles
gathered in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. “The stardust grains we discovered are
.
typical of the kinds of dust that were available at the beginning of our solar system,
these were the building blocks of the sun and planets”
The BBC has an article on the
“battery” dating from 200 B.C. residing in a Baghdad museum (to be pedantic,
the object is allegedly a “cell” - you have to join several cells together to
have a battery). The puzzle is what such a cell would be used for. One cell would
only produce about 2 Volts; the suggestions of electroplating or producing a mild
shock would require many cells to be linked with conductors, which isn’t something
that someone would do unless they already had a good understanding of electrical
current.
A colleague at work found a web site that he called “the ultimate in sad pursuits”:
the Degree Confluence Project,
dedicated to visiting and photographing each of the 1° intersections of
latitude and longitude. This involves travelling for hours to a place which
more often than not has
no feature of interest other than the zeroes on a GPS
receiver, while ignoring the
really interesting places just a few miles away. A sort of metaphor for life,
really.
From the I-used-to-be-paranoid-until-I-found-out-they-were-out-to-get-me
department, Google as Big Brother:
With 150 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google
amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned
data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick
efficiency that Google has already achieved. Google deserves your nomination for
corporate Big Brother of the Year.
Of course, Google-watch’s real gripe is that Google won’t let webmasters
play the system to their own advantage. Privacy on the net is largely an illusion
anyway, and people (including me) use Google because it gives them what they want.
Probably the only solution to the privacy problem is government regulation, such
as the European Union data protection laws, but this is a bit like putting Dracula
in charge of a blood bank (for example, the EU prohibition on personal data being exported
to countries with inadequate data protection regimes — such as the USA —
won’t stop
US Customs having direct access to EU airlines reservations databases).
Since Google took over Pyra, I’ve noticed that the banner ads served up by
BlogSpot mostly have some “Christian” connection. I don’t know whether this is
a function of the blog topics, or data gathering on me by Google. Google has
just launched a
targeted advertising service.
Recently residents of the English town of Chester were horrified to find that a Google
search for ‘Chester Guide’ returned a link to a site called ‘Chester’s guide to
picking up little girls’.
Google agreed that the site was illegal and removed the link.
Heard a news report this morning that an American court has ordered a metally ill murderer to be forcibly given medication so that he will be sane enough to execute him. Words fail me.
When I was a lad (we’re talking the 60’s here) shops sold both brown and white
eggs, but the brown eggs were more expensive. Now shops only sell brown eggs- I
don’t know whether hens are bred to produce only brown eggs, or perhaps more likely
the white ones all go into factory produced cakes. You see, (overlooking the
fact that they mostly come from battery farms anyway) British consumers
associate brown eggs with nature, and naturalness is good.
The New York Times had a piece yesterday on the
European distaste for genetically modified food products. If anything, the
article understates opposition to GM food amongst British consumers. Three years ago
every supermarket put up signs reassuring customers that their
shelves were GM free, and if any food was labelled now as containing GM ingredients
shops would literally have a hard time giving it away.
Certainly consumers have reasons to be wary of food safety— the government
was insisting for 10 years that BSE (”mad cow disease”) presented no risk to health, before it was
established that there was a real possibility of links to
human CJD.
There are serious environmental concerns as well. In Britain, as in most of
Europe, bio-diversity exists mainly in farmland, which supports most
of our wildlife and fauna. This contrasts with the American situation where
farms are in comparison biological deserts, and bio-diversity exists in
national parks and wild places. There are issues here over cross-pollination of crops
which just don’t apply in the much of the US.
There are deeper factors, though. Science is held less in awe here than seems to
be the case in the US. Distrust for scientific opinion is evidenced by continuing controversy over the safety of the
MMR jab and mobile
phone masts. Even more, the public instinctively distrusts Big Business. It is
by no means assumed that what is good for multinational companies is good for
the consumer. Given that GM foods involve complex science and are promoted by
very big business, it is hard for the person in the street to see any
benefit to themselves in GM food, and any reason to accept it in the face of
perceived risks, however slight and however irrational those fears may be.
Mark Byron is completely wrong in
attributing European resistance to GM food on anti-Americanism. “Ameriphobia”
simply doesn’t come into it.
With neighbours like ours, is it any wonder this is the (now rarely sung) second verse of the British National Anthem, “God Save the Queen”?
O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
Oh, save us all!
On a more serious note, jeanne d’arc considers the nature of true patriotism in the context of an essay on the White House’s National Security Strategy:
…the proposition that anything so multiple and large as a nation can be “good” is an insult to common sense. It is also dangerous, because it precludes any attempt at self criticism or self correction; it precludes public dialogue. It leads us far indeed from the traditions of religion and democracy that are intended to measure and so to sustain our efforts to be good. Christ said. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” And Thomas Jefferson justified general education by the obligation of citizens to be critical of their government: “for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.” An inescapable requirement of true patriotism, love for one’s land, is a vigilant distrust of any determinative power, elected or unelected, that may preside over it.
Via the no longer blogging Josh Sargent, a
spiritual profile of the seven Columbia astronauts, and the communities that are marking their loss. From the Episcopal church of David Brown’s family, came new verse to the hymn “Eternal Father, strong to save” based on the verses in Psalm 147 quoted by President Bush and also the poem “High Flight” that President Reagan quoted after the Challenger disaster:
“O God who names the starry host
and by whose love not one is lost,
who stretched thy arms wide to the sky
from cross to heav’n so death would die
Oh care for those who traversed space,
Embrace them now who touch thy face.”