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Reading this article about the Human Ape and why we are the only species to shed its body hair made me think.
Darwins theory, which I believe in, doesn’t really explain why we are the only creature to lose our fur. Therefore it casts doubt on Darwins theory is the conclusion. Mmmmm.
Well the problem with theories is that they are not always perfect. Vital components, yet to be thought about or discovered, are missing and thus cast doubt on the whole theory. Plus many, many factors take place which on the surface may not appear to have an impact on the theory but could explain it if only it was factored into the equation.
One example given in the article is that humans lost their hair due to natural selection. Men chose women with lower body hair to mate with and thus took us down this path. The argument against goes that ‘it is hard to believe one species should chose balder females’. ‘Hard to believe’ when we see so many amazing and unbelievable things in nature. That sounds controversial and certainly not a scientists way of talking. Now remember that we have an inbuilt preference for younger females, younger means more fertile and fitter in general, could this date from that time where we made decisions that the young, and the young of many creatures are hairless, were what we wanted and this bias led to us being hairless? Coupled with the Atlanteans driving SUVs and the fact we were able to use fur as coats could have led to hair being less of an issue and hairless individuals adapted quickly to the new requirement to get clothed and the hairy ones, probably feminists, refused to adapt drove the males away and died out as there was no PC industry around then to save them.
I don’t really know tbh but one thing I am aware of is that there are holes in many theories that do not get ripped apart as much as Darwins work. It is clearly an attack on science when science itself attacks all these theories in its attempt to get at the truth. Some attacks don’t seem to be interested in getting at the truth and we can see from what is taking place around the world with Creationism that Science is under direct attack. Its either religion, of all sorts, or greenies or anti people people or even more all trying to get science and technology stopped or banned and we all get back to as it was 1000 years ago where we eked out a subsistence existance. It will be reading and writing next to stop all progress and our government seems to have that well in hand at the moment with our dismal education system.
Its just a theory though.
Well it seems that the collapse of the Iron Curtain only allowed one real generation the freedom from fear of being annihilated in a nuclear fireball as it looks like we are trying to get back to that as a primary concern in our latest round of spread the fear. Although we have very little chance of dying in a nuclear fireball our government will never let the fear dissipate as we can see.
So now it seems that the terrorists have not being doing all that much over the last few years, except of course in films and on the TV. We need to re-stoke our fear, we are getting complacent and arguing with out government on policies they want to put through so it is time to redirect our activities back to non government issues, such are Iran getting the bomb and terrorists getting hold of it. The peasants are revolting so lets get them scared of yet another bogey man. They have always fallen for it before now.
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
So expect to see some, updated, info films based on the ones in the 1950s where we were shown how to cower under a desk and urinate on sheets to stop the radiation getting in to our homes and schools. Experts are asking the question ‘Is your city prepared for a home-made nuke?’. Considering there is really no such thing as a homemade nuke they really mean a terrorist controlled nuke. And I’ve never seen any factor 10,000 suncream so I suspect that we are all unprepared except for our useless governments who will make sure they live fine and well funded by us.
Personally, I much preferred the idea of radiation settling nicely on to a sheet of glass in the Middle East than us getting crisped over here but with the current western governments, every one of them, being all PC. anti everything phobic and whingy whiney it looks like Iran, and then the rest of the world, will have some nice shiny toys to play with soon.
Of course their primary target will not be western, it will be Israel who also has nukes. With the US looking like it is hanging them out to dry at the moment they will clearly be seen as an easy touch. They must be preparing and one of those steps must be deploying the nukes so that they can be used in retaliation. Iran hits Israel and wipes it off the map, including Gaza btw but who cares about them anyway, and then Israel strikes back and I believe they have over 200 warheads, that is Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and they must be thinking it, a couple on the US to stir the pot.
The only problem with that is that when a nuke goes off in the Israel or the US then the current bunch of namby pamby officials will be replaced by some real hard liners and the world will change for the worse. Does anyone really see China or Russia going to bat when Tehran is consumed in a nuclear fireball? I don’t. Unlike the nutters in the Middle East neither of those nations want a war and none believe in an afterlife. They, like our own government, just make talk when it benefits them and they are not prime targets for the terrorists yet.
I had better get out the back and start digging my fallout shelter. I wonder how many households have one of those built in the 1950s?
Scientists have been saying for some time that travel outside Earths atmosphere was full of hazards from radiation. It is one of the arguments used to say that Man did not get to the moon. It has always been one of the stumbling blocks for a manned flight to Mars and yet scientists have argued that we could still make it and plans have been drawn up.
Now, however, it seems that the radiation risk is too high for anything approaching a trip to Mars. The trip will take over a year compared to the two weeks for a trip to the moon. So, talks seem to be aimed at raising the level of radiation deemed acceptable and asking astronauts, the people who willingly sit on top of a big pile of explosives, if they are willing to accept a 1 in 5 chance of getting cancer rather than spending more on making sure the shielding is adequate.
Personally, I think that the risks are high enough as it is and the object should be to safely get there and back rather than a suicide mission. Nothing would be worse than seeing these guys die from cancer within a few years of returning. Of course, its up to them but I think if you told them that they would get to Mars and not get back they would all still volunteer. That is what these guys are like.
What exactly is the problem with shielding anyway? We know what we need to do to provide the shielding we need. We know that it will require extra fuel to push the extra mass, we know what the distances are and the timings for everything so can calculate the requirements exactly as we could do with less shielding. So what can the issue be? Cost and time are the only factors that can be changed. The shielding and its associated costs must make a significant difference to the total and/or the the trip time or development time must cause significant delays so that the current bunch of politicians won’t get any benefit from it. I’m leaning towards cost in the current economic climate. Going to Mars or funding a socialist utopia. Mmmmm. Let me think. What would our current politicians choose?
Of course if the astronauts do it with the current shielding then we can get it much cheaper and what are a few lives anyway from the mass of humanity. People, mass produced by unskilled labour.
From Computer Weekly’s paper edition.
It appears that UK broadband users should be thankful for what they get. Even though it is a long way short of the advertised broadband speeds.
A South African financial services company pitted its local broadband service against a pigeon to send a 4Gbyte file 80km. The pigeon,Winston, arrived with his encrypted USB stick in just under two hours seven minutes, by which time 4% of the file had arrived over the wires.
His owner reckons that Winston could cut his time to 45 minutes.
Got to laugh. I’ve always said that the old technologies should always be considered when evaluating what you are trying to achieve. Don’t just jump on the high tech bandwagon by default. It’s not always the best way.
However, A Pigeon? I really don’t see it taking off. 
It seems that the recession is hitting really hard. At home the amount of junk mail I get through the post has doubled over the last few months. Items from the general junk mail suppliers is pretty constant but the amount from people I have had some dealings with has increased significantly.
In addition I have received a cold call every night for the last week. Most were the usual cold callers but again two were from companies I had dealt with in the past that I had not spoken to for a while and I’m not convinced I gave them my number in the first place. Data miners, Grrr.
Then, EMail. I get a ton, each character weighs a little, of spam mail on a daily basis. My spam filters get most of it but a few gets through. They are usually, make my willie bigger (a noble cause) or online casinos (tax but with a chance of money back), but a couple again from companies I have dealt with in the past.
They must feel so desperate that spamming people is now acceptable. I feel sorry for the people on the phone. Most are clearly foreign so they can’t think very good things about us for being so rude. I’m getting really abrupt with them now. The EMails go straight in the bin as does the junk mail.
Finally, the forum spammers. What exactly do these guys want? Earlier I just deleted 40 spam comments. They use false EMails and web addresses. Both apparently random characters, albeit in the correct format with text that seems to be random as well. Even if I was to let it through they could never sell anything from it so what exactly is it for?
Well first I thought it was just there to annoy me. Why else would it sell nothing or endorse nothing? Then I thought of a more sinister use. They may actually be encrypted messages from Muslim nutters with plans about assassinating Gordo. Mmmmm. I was tempted to let them all through, just as a test mind. 
Although now I have deleted them I feel I must apologise to you all. Maybe they were hidden messages and I’ve just saved Gordo’s life. I feel really guilty. Our troubles could have been over but I made the wrong choice. I will go and give myself a thrashing for being weak.
I like Audi’s. I think they make the best mass market cars available at the moment. They look good, perform well and are affordable.
So when I spotted this car, the Audi e-tron Quattro, I thought that finally there is an electric car I would be proud to be seen in.
Very nice. Ignore the fact it is Red. Audi’s in my opinion should be black.
Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug died on the 12th, just a couple of days ago. I’m a bit behind the curve on this guy although I’ve heard about him and his work before. He is credited with saving over 250 million people from starvation and over a billion people from hunger by introducing farming techniques to the third world. Read his wiki entry here.
One thing he did say was ‘One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy’. He was in a good position to recognise that as all his work was being sabotaged by a bunch of whingy whiney greenies in bureaucracies around the world.
If only there were more like him there would be a lot fewer problems in the world.
Got to love this article. It certainly is written by someone from a theoretical science background working on another Phd.
Basically, what it is saying is that the way we work out theories is flawed because we don’t have all the data. What a surprise. However, that is what theories are for they allow people to guess what the missing data is and then experiment until they disprove the theory. A theory is never proved 100% although most are accepted as proven by experiments scientists like the work on them to enhance the theory.
In many cases people have extrapolated the missing data from observation and managed to fill in the blanks. In others they have added the missing data into a big X and allocated a single number to it. We have no idea what each unit is or it’s proportion and the theories still hold sound so do we really care in many areas. Eventually we will work it out more clearly as we learn more about the process.
So the old method we were taught in school, which was to watch what was going on, work out a theory and test it, repeat until it fails or we can explain what is going on seems to still be the way to go. It’s the scientific method. Or to put in a scientific way ‘Based on observations, scientists build models that, in turn, are used to make predictions. To the extent that the predictions are successful, scientists conclude that their models are accurate.’ Sounds pretty much like science from the first time someone looked at something and tried to explain why it happened to another.
It’s a plain fact that you don’t know what you don’t know but observation and testing helps us learn more of what we didn’t know which in turn helps us learn more about that and related areas. All held together by theories and experimentation.
Maybe we should be showing these techniques to the Climate Change crowds.
Reading this article where scientists have levitated mice using magnetic fields interacting with the water in their body. Cool. Research is still going on about the long term effects but I suspect there are few. We are surrounded by a magnetic field each and every day and we wear and interact with magnets all the time.
The research is looking at diagnosing bone loss for astronautsbut why not use it within an area on the spaceship to force them on the floor giving artificial gravity for anything with water in but not food and pens yet. Unless pens have a higher water content than I think. At the very minimum it would remove the requirement for the vomit comet and give each astronaut more exposure to weightlessness at reduced risk and cost.
Anyway, I’ll leave that to the scientists. What I want is a unit here in my home that I can sleep in where I can float and take the stress and strain from my body. Would be interesting for sex as well. Sounds great to me.
Now I’ve got my pervy thoughts out of the way I would guess it would also be of use in hospitals for burns victims and people looking at taking their body weight off a bed for some reason, sores etc.
In most, but not all, sci fi films and books robots are controlled by an artificial brain made up with silicon, or similar, type neurons. Asimov’s robots used a positronic brain which is his way of explaining away the complexity of the brain within our current electronic knowledge. It is sci fi after all.
Now it appears that researchers are looking at putting together an artificial brain made up from human brain cells, neurons. They have already successfully tested a robot that used rats brains.
I’m awaiting details on how they programme these brains. It will be the next step in computer and robotic science so it is of great interest to me. Although making a robot that does simple things is obviously simpler than making a robot that can act like a human. Because when the brain approaches the size of a human brain it will start to work things out for itself. The dream of AI researchers but certainly not something you want a tank like robot to be doing. On the other hand how do I get hold of my programming kit? I can think of many uses for it.
Personally, I think that free with every culture of brain cells, human or otherwise, we should include plenty of the sci fi films where the robots go amok and make it compulsory to watch before they can build anything. Films like Terminator, The Forbin Project, Deep Blue Sea, etc.
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The problem with theories
Reading this article about the Human Ape and why we are the only species to shed its body hair made me think.
Darwins theory, which I believe in, doesn’t really explain why we are the only creature to lose our fur. Therefore it casts doubt on Darwins theory is the conclusion. Mmmmm.
Well the problem with theories is that they are not always perfect. Vital components, yet to be thought about or discovered, are missing and thus cast doubt on the whole theory. Plus many, many factors take place which on the surface may not appear to have an impact on the theory but could explain it if only it was factored into the equation.
One example given in the article is that humans lost their hair due to natural selection. Men chose women with lower body hair to mate with and thus took us down this path. The argument against goes that ‘it is hard to believe one species should chose balder females’. ‘Hard to believe’ when we see so many amazing and unbelievable things in nature. That sounds controversial and certainly not a scientists way of talking. Now remember that we have an inbuilt preference for younger females, younger means more fertile and fitter in general, could this date from that time where we made decisions that the young, and the young of many creatures are hairless, were what we wanted and this bias led to us being hairless? Coupled with the Atlanteans driving SUVs and the fact we were able to use fur as coats could have led to hair being less of an issue and hairless individuals adapted quickly to the new requirement to get clothed and the hairy ones, probably feminists, refused to adapt drove the males away and died out as there was no PC industry around then to save them.
I don’t really know tbh but one thing I am aware of is that there are holes in many theories that do not get ripped apart as much as Darwins work. It is clearly an attack on science when science itself attacks all these theories in its attempt to get at the truth. Some attacks don’t seem to be interested in getting at the truth and we can see from what is taking place around the world with Creationism that Science is under direct attack. Its either religion, of all sorts, or greenies or anti people people or even more all trying to get science and technology stopped or banned and we all get back to as it was 1000 years ago where we eked out a subsistence existance. It will be reading and writing next to stop all progress and our government seems to have that well in hand at the moment with our dismal education system.
Its just a theory though.