Will someone in Ming Campbell’s office

learn to write headlines?

I think what they mean here is: Stop being Bush’s bitch, Ming tells Brown.

Woman nobody cares about not going

to church service involving a God that does not exist for a woman who is not here anymore.  The world has gone carpet-chewing mad.

I am not normally violent but the idiot Diana-fawning news editors who think this is news need slapping until their ears bleed. BBC first. Oh god its almost ten years since The End Of Love And Beauty In The World? I think I shall stand in the way of a gybing boom and try to spend the next few days in a restful oblivious coma until the media fawnfest is over. My gag reflex just can’t work for that long.  The quality of bacon and standard of football hasn’t been as good since she died, either.

Seriously now.

British society is convulsed (well the media is and politicians are): someone fired three shots from a pistol across a Liverpool pub car park and a football mad 11 year was hit in the neck and killed. The killer was a mid-teens white boy in a hoodie riding a BMX bike. BBC catchup here.

There was decent time for mourning (five days), and now the politicking has started. Liberal Burblings contrasts the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders reponses here (the comment from Linda Jack is pertinent, too and having been involved in youth work I agree with her). From the right an intelligent post from Dizzy Thinks here.  The politics really gets going in his comment section. There are political considerations sure, but the basic problem is one of animal behaviour, our inescapable biology.

Cram a lot of rats in a cage, they will fight and may kill one another. Britain is a small island with a lot of people on it: 60 odd million, many concentrated in cities and towns that sprawl into one another.  London, the Thames Valley, Birmingham and the West Midlands, the Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds Lancashire/West Yorkshire conurbations.

People are increasingly stuffed together and stressed, and I mean that in a biological as well as a human ‘oh god I’m so stressed’ manner. And sometimes, our animal natures makes us crack and fight.  It doesn’t excuse what the killer did on the BMX: he has to be held responsible for his actions, but…we evolved as creatures of the savannah and forest margins. Towns are a 10,000 year old idea.  The industrial revolution which really sucked large numbers into shitty cities is but 200 years old.

Large scale, high density urban living is a very new and an uncontrolled experiment. This young man’s murder is a tragedy, but unless we realize our animal natures occasionally override our shallow, recent civilization and the norms we wrongly think so profound, and factor this into our responses, we will never solve these problems.

I suspect we won’t solve them.  Angry, ill educated young men will always crave the power of a gun and long to see what it does when fired.

That is a whole shitload of

nothing.

(One billion light year wide void found in space.)

Fuck.  Me.  Daft.

The BBC: an apology

they’ve just finished a programme on Radio 5 Live with the question ‘how do you cure a depressed chicken?’  Who cares why? The SMS texts and emails flooded in .

‘Tell it to keep its pecker up.’

‘Tell it to pull itself to-feather.’

It’s why the BBC (radio, not TV) and the English language are great.  It was classic stuff.  You can listen again here.

BBC North East: I despair

The Guardian, damn them, ran an article telling the world that Runswick Bay is the best place for beachcombing in the country (and therefore the world). It’s a lovely place, but the article was bollocks: the beach is a sheltered one, gets little in the way of flotsam (I walk it most days) and the transport links they talk about just aren’t there (unless there is a railway station in the village I have missed.  I found a hairdressers I didn’t know about the other week.).

Worse was to come from our ‘local’ BBC TV, which splashed the news on its evening TV programme and showed aerial pictures of the village of? Staithes. 3 miles away. Close, but no cigar! We don’t like Staithes, we call Staithes people Ringers because the place has a rep for keeping certain things in the family. Like sexual reproduction.

So I email the BBC. A delightful reply. ‘The pictures were edited in Newcastle…don’t know that area of coast…our reporters do…’

1. You get a lot of license payers money to employ high quality people who should be expected to know their area and do basic, very basic journalistic shit like fact checking and research and know about…

2. Google Earth! I can find a friend’s house on the far side the of Atlantic, the BBC, which employs tens of thousands, can’t find a two mile wide bay that’s 60 miles away.

3. You’re not sure, so you make it up.

Not reassuring. Look North had a pretty low rating in our house even before this. Had I done that as a rookie newspaper reporter, I would not have been looking forward to the subsequent interview with the editor.

Cocktail sausage assault boy acquitted.

The 12 year old boy arrested, finger printed, DNA swabbed and charged with common assault with a cocktail sausage has been acquitted.

Presumably the geniuses at the Crown Prosecution Service brought the prosecution pork encourager les autres.

PZ Myers and the Pivar-tion of justice

PZ Myers at Pharyngula is being sued. An art collector called Mr Pivar with strong but misguided views on evolution wrote a book about embryonic development ‘n’ shit. Right in PZ’s academic bailiwick.

PZ ran it over. Mr Pivar published a second edition, enrichified with hindsight. PZ then reversed over the remains.

And Mr Pivar, in a snit, is suing Seed Magazine (Pharyngula’s publishers) for $15 mill. I’ll sell chutney for the defence fund, I’ll also testify that being called a ‘crackpot’ isn’t worth a frown, far less a lawsuit and $15 million. And I’m English English, so I know. We invented this stuff.

The atheist dictionary.

Disappointed [1614 Fr. v. past participle]

A dead christian.

Tyrannosaurus rex ran faster than footballers

say Manchester University. With enough brains to fill a tablespoon, it was also smarter.

Dr Bill Sellers has computer modelled T. rex running based on the fossil skeletons but make assumptions about muscle strength and density:

“The muscles that don’t fossilise we get from information from what we know about modern animals,” Dr Sellers said.

“It’s all anatomical information that goes into the model and then the computer itself chooses the best way of activating the muscles in the model to maximise the speed of the animal.”

Using their dinosaur modelling techniques, the team also modelled humans and ostriches and compared the results with measured values. The group is confident in its approach.

In the future, Dr Sellers and his team hope to produce 3D simulations of dinosaurs which will allow them to explore the full range of motions the reptiles were capable of.

“At the moment, computers aren’t quite big enough for all the things we want to do with the model. It takes a long time to get the animal to learn to walk. The next step is to move into 3D.”

They are currently working with animators on a dinosaur model which “because it uses the musculoskeletal model as the starting point, anything we get the animal to do, it could actually do”.

What a boss job that man has.