Since everyone else is doing it...

Lets see if I can pigeonhole myself:


My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 5.89, Libertarian: 8

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My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -4.29

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My Culture War Stance
Score: -5.17

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Anyone else noticing a bit of a theme?

Beyond parody

The Daily Hate is reporting the damning, SHOCKING results of a study which hasn't even started yet:

Coffee may raise child cancer risk: New evidence that caffeine could damage babies' DNA

To establish the link, scientists at Leicester University will scrutinise the caffeine intake of hundreds of pregnant women and compare the results with blood samples from their babies after birth.

Researcher Dr Marcus Cooke said there was a ‘good likelihood’ the study would make a connection.

This is so far beyond parody it's tragic.
And spot the Righteous'(ⓒ Leg_Iron) fast reaction hand-wringers in the comments:

I saw a pregnant woman drink a mocha followed by a cold coffee drink in my local coffee place. I won't mention the name of the firm (it's one of the big ones), but the young man on the till quite happily served her even though it was obvious they were both for her. I think that they have a responsibility that goes with their obscene profits.

The bitch. I do hope somebody called social services, plainly that child is doomed from the outset.

iPods Don't Like Magnets

Someone take a memo:

If you happen to be working elbow deep in industrial grade neodymium magnets, it's probably best if you don't listen to your iPod at the same time.
There's a slight chance your iPod will fly out of your pocket and attach itself to said magnets.
There is a good chance that the iPod will now adopt an unhappy face (nice touch, Apple) and the HDD will be fucked forever more.
Now someone print this out and staple it to my forehead.

Message ends.

An unhappy iPod, yesterday

p.s. I think my watch is being odd as well.

Offended at your disbelief in my belief

From Auntie Pravda:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7842769.stm

The Advertising Standards Authority said it had assessed 326 complaints. Some claimed the wording was offensive to people who followed a religion.

You see, I can't think the BHA could have worded the statement less offensively. It was a bland statement of the observable truth. If anything, does it not emphasise the significance of the the 'faith' of the religious? I mean if something was obviously true and you believed in it, that wouldn't require much in the way of faith now, would it?

And then there's this clown:

Last week, Christian bus driver Ron Heather, from Southampton, Hampshire, refused to drive one of the buses carrying the atheist slogan and walked out of his shift in protest

Original article from last week

Ron Heather, from Southampton, Hampshire, responded with "shock" and "horror" at the message and walked out of his shift on Saturday in protest.

Yes, horrifying.
If he had shown the same attitude because of a display promoting Jewish or Islamic ideals, he would probably be facing disciplinary procedures for religious/racial "intolerance". But because he downed tools over someone else's assertion that there probably isn't an invisible sky fairy pulling our strings, and that we might possibly be better off focussing on just getting along with each other, his bosses at First group bent over backwards to accommodate his pointless and juvenile tantrum.

What someone believes in their own time is their bag, but if you're going to let your superstitions get in the way of your job, then you don't deserve to keep your job.

MP Expenses Campaign

From DK and LPUK.

Douglas Carswell MP (One of the good guys hiding in the Tory Party) has decided not to go with the flow of MP's hiding their expenses and is going to publish his accounts to April 2009 in full. H/T The Devil

We have been looking out for a campaign that would follow up the November 5th send your MP a copy of George Orwell's 1984.

How about the following as a standard letter to cut and paste.


Dear Sir or Madam

Members of Parliament published expenses

I am sure that you will agree with me that one of things that causes such lack of confidence in MPs is the constant attempts by Members of the House of Commons to claim for expenses at charge to the hard pressed taxpayer and then not to publish their expense accounts in full.

Personally I fail to understand why my employer and the HMRC require all expenditure to be properly receipted, yet members feel that they should not supply receipts for expenditure under £25 and have a special exemption under the Freedom of Information Act to cover their expenses.

Will you confirm to me that you will be following the commendable example of Douglas Carswell MP, who has made a public declaration that he will publish his expenses in full upto April 2009.

If you feel that is not something that you want to do, can you explain on what grounds you do not wish to follow Mr Carswell's example.


Yours Sincerely


A Constituent

If you would like to let us know at 1984@lpuk.org who you have written to and by St Valentine's day, Feb 14th we can send a Valentines card of shame to the House of Commons with all of those MPs who have ignored you, refused to give a commitment to publish, or fudged the issue. Remember that your MP is only required to respond to his Constituent, who is in effect his employer.

For my part I've written to Andrew Smith, who is the labour MP I'm afflicted with. I shall let you all know what he comes back with.

*UPDATE* Well that was quick. Plainly they tremble before me.

Spending your money.

Last week Obo posted a description of how he would sort out government spending, and rather excellent it was too.

Because all things must rotate around me, I asked:

I haven't heard the consensus on publicly funded science research like at my place or Cern.

What say you Obo?

And he (not unreasonably) answered:

@saltedslug: Hm. That's a very tough one. On the one hand, my natural reaction to that kind of thing is that I don't hand out subsidies. On the other, it is remotely possible that it might deliver some sort of breakthrough.
I think that there would be a huge takeup in the slack of state-sponsored research by commercial companies again in a libertarian Britain. Something as dear as CERN could probably not be unilaterally funded by the UK anyway.
So I guess I'd be inclined to stick with the "no subsidies" line. Large companies have historically had the resources to do a lot of this kind of thing, hopefully being freed of some much burdensome regulation and tax would encourage them to do research for competitive purposes.

Right, here's the thing. I work on the ISIS Neutron Spallation source at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. RAL is run by the Science and Technology Facilities Council(STFC) which is one of the research councils funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. We're not subsidised, we are totally paid for by the taxpayer. The Guardian produced a useful chart of government expenditure a while ago:

And here's the relevant bit close up:

And here are some annotations to illustrate just how I'm sucking the public teat:


(incidentally the £150m was the build cost for ISIS TS2. The annual running cost is probably closer to £3m).

Now we've established I'm a parasite, but the question is: Can we privatise the lab in the manner which Obo is alluding to above? Well, yes you can privatise anything, but will it provide the same service? Probably not. You see this facility and the others like it (the most overt global example being Cern) don't do commercial research, they do speculative research. That is to say, 'pure' science. We work by providing a facility to academia; PhD types come here to do research (for 'free') and go away and write papers about it. That is how we gauge our progress and productivity, not by selling a product or service, but by the number of peer-reviewed academic papers generated by research at our facilities per year.

With regard to privatising institutions like ours, I've mentioned the fate of Bell labs before:

See Lucent-Alcatel's shameful shutdown of pure science at Bell labs in order to concentrate on more marketable research. It's understandable, but short sighted bearing in mind that Bell labs pretty much invented data networking, the transistor, solar cells, mobile phone technology, lasers, comms satellites, DSP, Unix and C.

So, can we have a privately owned lab which serves the same function as the publicly funded ones we have now? In the UK with the current situation, I would say no. UK universities are mainly publicly funded, with additional money coming from a variety of sources mainly in the form of research grants. But your average red-brick uni has a lot less cash than your equivalent US Ivy League college, because they are private institutions who have much greater control over their income.
So if we wanted to privatise the likes of the STFC facilities, we'd have to privatise the universities first. That way they would have a lot more control of their own income and lease the labs' facilities from the company/concern running the place. And the lab would do a fair bit more commercial work to take the rest of the slack up (we do some occasional work in between the theoretical stuff analysing wings for Airbus and testing detergents for Unilever). Would this work? Buggered if I know. Like any other kind of engineering, it's all about the trade-offs.

The public sector needs paring down to it's bare bones, and we should be no different. It's just that it's going to require a bit of a paradigm shift across the board if we wish to privatise everything and keep up with the other developed countries in these fields.
God knows we need all the innovation we can get right now.

Bloody hell

Right, I haven't posted in two weeks. I have been very busy making sure that your taxes are producing the best science money can buy. Honest.
I must have six draft posts waiting to unload, bear with me.

In the meantime, in case you missed it on Sunday here is some terrorists dying of plague courtesy of The Sun. How fitting for a group that wishes to live in the dark ages. *Update* This story probably is bollocks. That'll teach me to post drive-by style.

Oh and in case you were wandering what Gordo listens to in the morning:

What a load of bollocks

So I've been back in the country since the weekend and I've been quietly observing and going back over the past few weeks' news and blogs.
Whilst people are being unpleasant to each other in some god-awful stretch of dirt in the middle-east, some bloggers had a bit of a disagreement about it and apparently the world ended. Unfortunately the venue for the tiff was the LPUK blog, which just makes us look like some squabbling student group.
I was going to comment on the conduct of those involved, but I really don't think it is worthy of any further attention. The whole situation is trivial (regardless of the barely literate assertions of some commenters) and I'm going to ignore it until heads cool and normal service resumes.

The whole thing is a waste of time and effort.

Back

Right, I'm back from that there America place and aren't I glad about it - Nothing says 'home' like a face full of freezing drizzle.

I did for the most part not have access to the Internet while I was away, so was at the mercy of the American TV news networks. As such I was pretty much unaware of anything happening outside of their humble shores unless it involved people being unpleasant in the middle east.

So, I'm on catch-up for the time being so will probably post some 'what Slug did on his holidays/those crazy yanks' type threads for a couple of days.