a closely fought intellectual slugging match, think the Nobel awards mixed in with the chariot race from Ben Hur, with tuna sandwiches at the end.
We were asked to list the seven cardinal virtues (from Catholic doctrine). The best answer? Puking.
Applause.
Greg Laden asks, says no, and goes on to explain why in some good blogging on peer-reviewed research.
I’d say the UK and America are in the adiposcene era.
‘What?’ I bark. I am plumbing and a pipe has just come off in my hand that shouldn’t wot of. Lots of uncontained water around.
A friend tells me that a lady has just come out of a bus-station wearing a pair of knickers on her head. She is quite cheerful, and no-one in the mixed urban throng is being cruel or taking the piss.
Those social workers (ik, gah) don’t get ‘em all and society isn’t as bad as it’s sometimes painted.
The full story here.
In King Henry VIII’s day he’d have been paid for that and had good career prospects, rather than getting six years.
This blog is where I tourette (including about evils like ‘verbing’ nouns). But thanks to my association with The Beagle Project it has been getting some attention of late, so perhaps it is time to say something profound.
The greatest recording in the world is Carlos Kleiber’s version of Beethoven’s fifth and seventh symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic.
If the first movement of the fifth doesn’t move you big numbers on the Richter scale, have a friend ring an embalmer or SETI because you’re dead or a strange cloth-eared alien.
Deutsche Grammophon 447 400-2. No Amazon link, support your local shops.
Update: I knew Richard Carter of Gruts would object, dissent, or aver. He has, in comments.
The Catholics in government are getting uppity.
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill is going through the House of Lords (the unelected upper house).
Pro-life side of the argy (pron. ar-gee, Manchester for argument) here.
Among other things, it legislates to allow the production of hybrid human-animal embryos to establish stem-cell lines and removes the need for IVF providers to take into account the need for a father when considering a application for treatment.
The ‘pro-lifers’ in the Lords have tried in a series of amendments to stop, slow or dilute the provisions in the Bill. (Religion: noses out of science, please) Reading the debates, they all seem to have been defeated. So now the Catholic Cabinet Ministers in the Labour Government are making a fuss and threatening rebellion, this at a time when Prime Minister Gordon Brown is weakened by the recent resignation of a cabinet minister under something of a cloud.
In a past life I worked with these people, and their agenda has not changed. They tried to amend the law on abortion to lower the upper time limits, and while talking the language of the embryo’s right to life, they privately admitted that if they won this one it would be the first skirmish in abolishing abortion completely. They oppose IVF, bristle at contraceptive provision to teenagers, and embryo research is anathema. The bioethics commission would have been nothing more than another body to bog down scientific research.
If Labour’s Cabinet Ministers don’t like it they should resign from cabinet, speak and vote against it from the back benches. We elect a government to run this country and the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church has no place sticking its nose or strangely invented theology into it.
Prof Colin Blakemore, writing in today’s Observer about the implications of Craig Venter’s recent artificial genome breakthrough says:
There is no widely agreed regulatory framework for this kind of research. We need to debate this issue based on rational argument, rather than the kind of anti-scientific attitudes that we see emerging in Parliament around the new Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill, and pushed by the Catholic church. Legitimate concerns about risk must not be hijacked by those who set religious convention above the value of science.
We should applaud the extraordinary scientific advance announced last week. And we should reflect on what this tells us about the nature of life. But we also need to think.
Well, that’s what happens when you sleep a nanometre away from the Aga. (It has worn an omelette before now.) It licked the Lavazza off, and has been acting very strangely all day. It has just attacked me three times, duffed up the bannisters fine style, sent next door’s dog yelping over the horizon and a passing spaniel was saved from an attack that would have made a tiger proud only by stout gate with mesh fencing stapled over the gaps.
There could have been spaniel claret* ( I bet that’s a googlewhack) all over the manor.
*Claret, Brit gangster-speak for blood.
In our northern european waters with unpredictable winds (I’ve won anchor in a force 3/4 and two minutes later been hooning along gunwales under in a force eight) we prefer ketches (the Wikipedia page is pretty poor). You can dump your mainsail in an emergency, lose a lot of sail area and still have a balanced rig that handles well. I like ketches, but a schooner under full sail is one of the most lovely sights on the water (a fantailed topsail cutter with topsail set and all jibs flying runs it a very close second). Unless, of course they are being sailed by Germans, in which case my advice is stay well clear.
Schooner swag - tshirts, mouse mats and stuff - available here.
Schooners in literature - just finished a Patrick O’Brian binge, the later books. In The Commodore Captain Jack Aubrey wins the schooner Ringle from his friend Heneage Dundas in a game of backgammon (why don’t I ever get into games like that?). She acts as his tender and scouting vessel with Master’s Mate William Reade (who lost an arm in the battle with the Dyaks in Nutmeg of Consolation) in delighted command for the rest of the series. She is a Baltimore Clipper-hulled vessel, right fast and weatherly, and according to her crew - Sethians much given to smuggling in a previous nautical life, with names like Mould (’a weazened sinner’) and Vaggers - every bit as fast as the ‘Flying Childers’, a smuggling vessel of uncommon speed - especially when the skipper was ‘driving the barky right zealous’. If you haven’t read the Aubrey Maturin series, what have you been doing with your literary life?
Monty Don was on the BBC 5 Live Simon Mayo show today, puffing his TV series Around the World in 80 Gardens. He’s the gardener I wish I could be: he looks like he’s been grown up a trellis, he has the patience and application to keep on top of the jobs, where as I am a neglect-and-blitzkrieg type of gardener. He’s also a thinker.
Go and get the Daily Mayo podcast for Friday. His comments about global warming and the role of society in surviving the interesting times ahead are a thought-provoking listen. He’s no climate scientist in this strict sense of the word, but he’s been gardening, intimately connected with soil, plants, the outdoors and the weather for many years. He said that in his opinion ‘the kaka has already hit the fan’, that we’re basically over the edge, we haven’t just starting going downhill very fast yet.
He posed the question what happens where the fuel isn’t there to ship food around the world, how resilient are our societies? (As one living in a village prone to power cuts not very, I can tell you. Stuff stops very quickly.) Nine days of snow could empty our supermarkets of food, and as someone once said, we’re only two missed meals from a society rioting.
The solution, he said, lay in communities cooperating rather than a retreat into individualism - more like wartime Britain when people ‘dug for victory‘:
and we were, co-incidentally, the best nourished we have ever been, rather than the fat idle fast food-fed fuckers we are rapidly degenerating into. That works in this Yorkshire village, fertile fields all around and the sea a mile away. London, eight million? Interesting times. And anyone writes a book called ‘the wisdom of a gardener’, (or any variations thereof) I want my slice, or I’ll be after you with me spade. And I’m descended from canal-digging Paddy navvies, so I swing a mean spade.
is our aid money going to preserve the right of Afghan courts to pull this kind of shit? A journalist has downloaded material deemed to be blasphemous to Islam, and he has been sentenced to death. He has a couple more courts to be dragged through before this sentence is confirmed.
I would be interested to know if the court opened with prayers that invoked a god and included the phrase ‘the merciful’. The Afghan Embassy in London Contact Page welcomes feedback and encourages recommendations, suggestions and complaints.
I’ve emailed my MP and asked him to give the Foreign Office a good poke to make representations about Mr Kambakhsh (I don’t hold out any hope though, our Foreign Secretary is a bit of a turnip). Possibly I don’t understand and Mr Kambakhsh will be let off with a small fine and told to pick up some litter. If not, Allah must be a very insecure deity if the transmission of a load of 1s and 0s over a telephone line makes his foundations wobbly and mandates the execution of a young journalist. Pillocks.
PZ Myers at Pharyngula handles the matter with customary aplomb.
