What Qualifies?

If there was a news media meltdown every time someone became pregnant, we’d never hear about anything else. I don’t mean to deny the role that what remains of the British monarchy plays in the wealth of this nation, nor that there are people who truly do care what celebrities are getting up to, but what I don’t quite get is how this is front page news, next to people getting slaughtered overseas and new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. I suppose that when news isn’t personally tailored to the watcher the things that some may not consider important overrule some things of great importance to some, much to the latter’s chagrin. I suppose there are people who wait with baited breath for the sports section of the news, whereas I usually switch off, but that’s a matter of personal taste, as, I suppose, is whether or not a pregnant princess is important enough to qualify as news.

As Youtube and other services like it become more popular, perhaps news will become more tailored towards the individual rather than as the nation as a whole, perhaps that’s where we’re heading, into a world where we can hear what we like and pretend that celebrity culture doesn’t exist to sustain whatever faith in humanity has managed to cling onto the remains of our brains at that point.

As much as I care about the latest discoveries, I’m sure that there are people who couldn’t give less of a shit about how technology is being used to save peoples lives and the planet, and there are probably equally as many people for whom the prospect of finding life on mars is but a huge ‘meh’. To those people, I raise a solitary eyebrow, but I understand that not everyone is going to agree on everything, and that’s largely a good thing.

Adams’ Apple

Given the nature of this blog I should really be tackling what Mike Adams said about the Higgs Boson, but to be honest, with an idiot of that magnitude the ship has truly sailed, that man cannot be saved, not when he’s making money spouting nonsense and watching hundreds of people nod in unquestioned agreement all while ironically telling people to ‘think for themselves’.

Instead I will leave him to his crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy nights of being crazy, even though I don’t actually believe that he’s truly ‘crazy’, as I believe I discussed here before. What he is however, is wrong, and really when your website has ‘news’ in its title, isn’t being right kind of your duty?

What I can talk about in relation to his being wrong is that with all the talk of regulating the internet, surely ISPs should be blocking people from accessing sites with information that’s so wrong it’s dangerous, rather than instead blocking file sharing websites and pornography. I mean when was the last time porn told you to stop vaccinating your children and to ignore your cancer treatments in favour of doing some more exercise and eating the odd organic apple?

The answer to that one I think you’ll find… well I’d like to say never but I’ve heard many times that if it exists there’s a porn of it, and as much as I’d hate to see some Mike Adams double making love to a basket of organic fruit I’m sure that somewhere, someone’s made it, which leads to the unfortunate connotation that someone’s probably enjoying it out there, and enjoying it in ‘that way’.

*shudder*

Habbo Habbo

Let me fill you in on a little thing I don’t quite understand, so I suppose by filling you in I wouldn’t be doing so much as… filling you in, as much as… um… letting you know I hold contention with it.

And wouldn’t you know it you can write a blog post with ums!

Whodathunkit?

There was a kerfuffle going on on the news last night about the creepiness of some users in Habbo Hotel. Now, the first question you should be asking there is: Habbo Hotel is still a thing?

Well yes, apparently it is, and it’s a hub for cybersex and paedophiles as far as the news would like us to believe.

But the idea that to solve this problem we should be locking down on social networking sites and putting harsh measures in doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Surely parents of these children that are going on these sites, y’know, have the responsibility placed on them?

Until your child is of age the onus to protect them is surely partly due to you? Perhaps I misunderstand, being childish and naive myself, however, I would hesitate to suggest that the venue for these events is the thing that needs changing. Perhaps I sound, again, naive, when I think like this, but there are people policing these sites, it’s just difficult to catch everyone unless you have the social networking equivalent of the soviet union under your hands.

Now, I’m exaggerating, and I do understand the degree to which parents despise venues that allow both children to enter and users to participate in ‘cybersex’; it’s a horrible position to be in as a parent, not wanting to restrict your child’s activities but also wanting to keep them safe. But I do have a certain nervous twitch whenever people demand an overhaul of something on first instinct.

Good News/Bad News: Biology Meets Technology

Or should it really be called good news this week? Because you know, I really couldn’t find two news stories I wanted to talk about this week. I do have a bad news item this week but it’s pretty minor and I’ll probably put it out there now, because I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it.

If you live in the UK (as I do), the promise of an ipad with 4G technology is… debatable…

Not because the ipad doesn’t have the technology to back up the claim, but because of two reasons that are more a question of functionality.

1) 4G systems aren’t widely available over here.
2) When they do they’ll probably work on a different frequency, and therefore will not interact with the ipads that are tuned to US frequencies.

So that sucks if you’re an apple fan/someone with lots of money to throw away.

Take a look for yourself, then we can have a discussion about why there is a product on the market that’s a giant iphone without the phone.

But if you’re excited about the future of tiny, tiny electronics I may have something nice to tell you in regards to utilising the piezoelectric effect and its effects at work on bacteriophages.

For those of you who don’t know what a bacteriophage is from the name alone, you’ll have certainly seen a picture of one at some point. These are viruses that use bacteria for reproduction and metabolism, and are essentially harmless to us because of this specialisation. They look (at least to me) like the Apollo 11 landing module, what with their bulbous heads and spindly legs.

Look them up, they’re awesome.

What’s very interesting, and what the American department of energy discovered, is that when a film of these viruses had an electrical field applied to it, the helical proteins covering the viruses responded by twisting and turning. An interesting phenomena you might say, and I would agree, however, the really cool part was that, using negatively charged amino acid residues they were able to increase the voltage of the virus, an act that was also observed when stacking 20 layers of these viruses.

So, and correct me if I’m wrong, this suggests that we may be able to utilise bigger voltages on a smaller scale using these creatures.

And that’s pretty damn cool.

The Arrogance of Ignorance

Assuming that you can see the video above me, you may recognise the man doing the terrible rapping in this song, and giving off a message that, unfortunately, people are swallowing up like the pills he despises.

Mike Adams’ youtube has thousands of subscribers, and I suspect his website (natural news) has many more regular viewers.

I find it hard to believe sometimes that people can watch this video and not see that this is the very definition of fear-mongering, there’s really no nice way of saying it. The man spreads medical lies to the masses and makes a ton of money off of it, all in the name of battling the very things that he’s doing, using health claims for monetary gain and lying about drug efficacy, and yet he’s the true culprit!

I am honestly shocked that this guy’s still allowed to run a website. Surely this stuff is more dangerous than anything the pirate bay or megaupload could do. So why are people attacking those sites, sites which allow people easier access to different kinds of media that they may not be able to access otherwise (whether because of money or cable packages), and leaving this guy alone?

I object completely to policing the internet, but if you’re going to be doing it, then go after the people who are actually dangerous to the public, not the people who are trying to help them out.

The fact that someone like Mike Adams can call the whole field of psychiatry, never mind vaccines, a scam, is a testament to the spread of misinformation in our society and the arrogance of ignorance.

In the past people were locked up and put away because they couldn’t control their urges; that was egrigious.

But there are many people whose mental disorders are so disruptive to their living in a society without their problems that they need certain drugs to function. Believe it or not, sometimes, psychiatric medication makes peoples’ lives easier!

Health foods do not solve the problem.

 

Good News/Bad News: Save The Koalas & Sillicene

Hello and welcome to good news/bad news; a segment that I should probably stop introducing now it’s coming into it’s fourth/fifth/sixth week but that I refuse to stop explaining.

Every Monday I go through the news and find stories that I deem good and bad, report them to you in my own special way, and then spread some youtube love to perk you back up.

First up, the news that we may be on the way to manufacturing smaller and smaller chips to electronic devices, and much sooner than we previously thought we may be sliding down the slide of progress.

Still don’t know what I’m talking about?

Go to this link and catch yourself up.

What we have learned from the molecule graphene (a regular sheet-like structure of carbon atoms) may be applied to its elemental cousin silicon, which is in the same group on the periodic table (and therefore shares many chemical properties) as everyone’s favourite element. By utilising silicone, according to New Scientist, we may be able to more easily integrate this molecular structure into the previously established silicone-based chips.

That, my friends, is good news; although I am a little sceptical of the use of silicone just because it’s not as chemically ‘flexible’ as carbon. However, the results are looking pretty good so far.

Alas, the bad news is pretty tragic.

Take a look over here and cry your eyes out for the decline of Koalas, everyone’s favourite marsupial.

Don’t you look at me like that, kangaroo!

This is the sad news that parts of Australia (not the whole country) have now classed the humble koala as a vulnerable or threatened species. In fact, according to the BBC; in New South Wales and Queensland, population numbers have taken a 40% hit since 1990.

This does not mean that Koalas are doomed, but in certain areas of Australia there has been a big drop in numbers, and because they are both iconic and adorable, Australia has a duty to restore the koala kingdom to its former glory!

Hey, anyone want to see a koala running down a hall?

Good News/Bad News: Both Sexes to Live Long and Prosper… also One Direction suck

Welcome to this week’s… sorry, I mean last week’s good news/bad news, where I find news stories that both make me grin like a blissful idiot and make me want to shove my face into a wood chipper until my scowl emerges from the other end, bloody, covered in wood chippings and flung into a million little, fleshy pieces.

First, we’ve got some good news, news which may mean that equality is coming in a completely different way than we usually think of it when we talk like that. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that women are going to be paid the same as men, it doesn’t mean that gays can now marry anywhere and everywhere and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still policemen out to capture young, black people.

No, as much as all of those things would be nice we’ve got a different flavour of good news and that is that by 2030, thanks to advantages in medicine and healthcare, men may statistically come to live as long as women.

Yeah, that’s right ladies, now we are one step closer to gaining immortality!

Take a long look people of the republic of internet, because this could be awesome.

One of the proposed reasons for where the graph of life expectancy is heading is a drop in the number of male smokers, something which for some of us may be apparent from the people we know, young and old, and for some a source of confusion, as smoking is still the official activity of the young and tenacious.

The bad news here is incredibly different, and while I apologise wholeheartedly for the disparity, the utter unrelatedness, the nonconnecteditude of these two items…

I really hate One Direction, and apparently I should be a little cynical about some of their fans too.

Take a look here and see what I mean.

So as much as I despise gossip stories, I’m reporting this for the sheer extremity of 1D fans’ reactions to some lady on twitter, who just happened to be lip buddies with the ugliest member of the band.

I suppose if nothing else comes of this, at least after the things she’s been called she might no longer know what makes her beautiful anymore, and as we all know, that is the key to attractiveness in the eyes of the musical monstrosity that is One Direction.

Anyway, for some reason, even though the guy’s still under concerns about possibly having a sexually transmitted disease, fans called the woman a ‘fucking bitch’ and a ‘prostitute’.

Perhaps they should calm down and realise that if they threw a brick at their boyfriends’ faces; they’d probably look like Harry from One Direction as well.

Good News/Bad News: The Glacial Resist Stance (Part 2)

Welcome back to last week’s good news/bad news where I haven’t quite finished with you yet.

I think you will notice, if you look at the language used by my four different sources for this glacial bulk-up story that the more reliable sources don’t try to ‘forget global warming’, and to be honest, the fact that the Daily Mail can say things like this and still have the huge following that it possesses really makes me wonder about the state of society today.

What did nature have to say?

- “some glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range are growing despite a warming global climate”
- “the glaciers are indeed becoming heftier, if only slightly“

In fact the glaciers gained ice that would be the equivalent of 11cm of liquid water, and this is a good thing, this is good news. The fact that there are strongholds of ice in the world, however few, means that we may be a teensy, teensy bit less quickly screwed.

But when we have sources like the Daily Mail proclaiming that we should ‘forget global warming’ because of this? That will only inspire more apathy among its readers, inspiring less people to try and help the earth out while we still can, because you can guarantee when the time comes that it’s too late to save the earth, the Daily Mail will have a different headline to read. It’ll probably be something like ‘Science destroys planet’ where they take all blame from the media and blame scientists, muslims and immigrants for not saving the world fast enough and conveniently forget how often they discouraged trying to help the only planet we bloody have.

Have I mentioned I hate the Daily Mail?

Because I really hate the Daily Mail.

To lighten the mood however, I give you a video of homegrown labware being made in a 3D printer, custom labware for complex chemical reactions. I love this technology.

Good News/Bad News: The Glacial Resist Stance (Part 1)

Hello and welcome to last week’s good news/bad news, the segment where I find something fresh off the press that represents good and something that represents bad, all in my opinion and all without shame.

This week I have the same story from four different sources and I want to make it clear from this why the daily mail should be forced into bankruptcy, and if that’s not possible, for every copy, every building and every website associated with it to burst into flames.

Because this issue deals with issues of climate change, and the daily mail, being the propaganda paper that it is, has pretty much become our bad news for this week.

Let’s go deeper, shall we?

So…

In the blue corner, we have nature – the weekly journal of science!

In the red corner, we have the daily mail – the daily journal of bollocks!

In the yellow corner, we have BBC news – the taxpayer-funded, usually reliable journal of… news?

In the green corner? Well, whatever colour this corner is, we have the guardian, the usually reliable paper that houses Charlie Brooker, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh on occasion, and therefore a paper which I have to try pretty hard to suppress my bias for.

From that alone, you should get a pretty good idea of how this may turn out, but the most important fact in all of this is the news item.

And that news item deals with the observations of a glacier on the border of Pakistan and China, a glacier that is apparently gaining ice.

Already I can hear you guessing which way the daily mail swung out on this one, and if you’ve already clicked the link you know how bad a job they did with their headlines this time.

‘Forget global warming, scientists discover glaciers in Asia getting BIGGER’ it reads.

And I facepalm so hard my hand practically cracks open my skull.

So, you decide which paper you think won this one out while I prime myself for the second part of this tomorrow, with this unaddressed letter to the daily mail.

Dear Daily Mail,

Here on earth, we have a process that we like to call ‘science’.

It would seem that you don’t quite understand how the process of science works, so let me hit you with some knowledge. One data point does not mean a well-established theory is wrong.

The evidence has to weigh out, and unfortunately for our planet, the fact this Asian glacier may be gaining ice does not overrule the many and more elaborate observations that support the theory that the climate of the earth is changing, and in fact, this glacier growth does not necessarily even dispute this theory.

So before you decide to be sensationalists, get your facts straight.

Because when it comes to matters such as the possible man-made destruction of our planet, we don’t need any more people to be stuffed with the false impression that climate change is pseudoscience.

Please stop publishing and kindly leave your offices to sit and weep in whatever circle of hell you left your intellectual and journalistic integrity in.

Yours sincerely,

Me.

Good News/Bad News: Tyson On Asteroids

I suppose this isn’t really news, but it came up when I looked at google news so I’m counting it for this week, I mean last week, and because of the mix of hope and dubious implications if we are held back by such simple things as funding priorities, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s article in Wired magazine today shall be our stories for the day.

So, welcome to last week’s good news/bad news, where each week, usually a day late, I find some good news and some bad news to share with you, the good people of the internet and soothe you into taking your leave from this blog with something from youtube designed to make you smile.

It’s your job to decide whether I succeeded I suppose.

Take a lookie here for the article. As always Tyson is extremely eloquent and a riveting communicator of science.

In discussion about the threat of asteroids to the earth today, Neil Tyson mentioned three ways in which we could possibly prevent asteroid impacts. Stop me if you’ve heard this but it’s always interesting to me to ponder how we could save ourselves from destruction without the aid of Bruce Willis and Steven Tyler’s over-sized mouth.

1. Nuclear bomb

2. Neutron bomb

3. Gravitational tractor

The first involves blowing up the potentially deadly target, the second would alter the asteroid’s orbit through detonation and the third would attempt to alter the direction of the space rock with the gravity of a probe sent towards the asteroid.

The third seems like the best choice at the moment, although if the odds remain in our favour we will have no need to deploy any of these, so keep your fingers crossed and ignore those who would tell you that an impact is ‘due’.

The bad news I suppose is that, even if we dismiss the coastal damage that could be caused by the impact of Apophis in 2036 (if its trajectory happens to hit the right/wrong angle), that earth will in all fairness probably be hit by an asteroid long before it gets swallowed up by the sun expanding.

So if you were planning on staying alive for millions of years and being the captain going down with your ship, you’d better work out some way of increasing funding for these preventative measures.

Now since we’re in Tyson’s area now, how about some melodies from the man himself.