Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: ■ Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fœtuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

Andrew’s comments are no longer allowed on this blog. This is because he has a tendency to write opinions based on logic and not from experience or facts. He is a programmer by profession.

Dammit, I do have a tendancy to write opinions based on logic. Oh, she really nailed me there. ‘Zing’, I should think, and probably even ‘oh, snap’. And so forth. Feel free to visualise Jon Stewart-style gesturing if it helps.

Goodbye, then, anonymous homeopath. Live long and prosper.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

You may know already that I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but it’s not him. I found his style of agument quite conservative and traditional: people have been trying to win arguments by pointing out the gaping holes in their opponents’ ideas for centuries. Ancient people used evidence to draw conclusions. There’s nothing new there.

No, his opponent, Dr Sigman, is the genius here. I have, in retrospect, seen his argument elsewhere, too, but he has formalised it further than most. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. We disagree and are talking.
2. Therefore, There Is A Debate.
3. Therefore, the cautionary principle applies.
4. Therefore, whatever I dislike should be banned.

• Other people, scientists, write their content for no fee.
• The journal then gets other scientists to review it. These scientists generally don’t get paid either.
• The authors edit the paper and send it back. Eventually, all the scientists reach a version of the paper they can all agree on (or the paper gets withdrawn). Then the authors pay the journal to publish the paper.
• The journal then charges anyone who ever wants to read the paper extortionate fees. $50 for a PDF file is not uncommon.
• The journal retains the copyright on the words they didn’t write describing experiments they didn’t do, and claim fees for reading it at least until the copyright expires and usually long after that.
• None of the scientists or their employers ever get paid.

This, to me, seems like an insane system. It survives because universities don’t care if they pay extortionate fees for such things and because it’s established. And probably when it was established it made sense — after all, who else but journals could publish things? But now it’s just academia needlessly funnelling money into a mostly pointless publishing racket. I really don’t see what it achieves.

I’ve said before that a better system would just be for universities to publish papers and let anyone who wants to comment on them comment on them. I hadn’t worked out the details, obviously, so it was one lunchtime rant in the pub opposite the lab and I didn’t think much more about it until the next time I hit a paywall demanding I give some publishers $75 to read a paper written by my own supervisor. But someone else has worked them out. It’s not perhaps an ideal system, but it looks pretty good to me and it’s compatible with the existing system.

Dubbed GPeerReview (I don’t know what the ‘G’ stands for but the author’s name is Gashler so that’s likely), the idea is that you post your paper on your academic website, email people you think would be interested, and those and any other readers can review it. They sign their review, along with a hash of the paper, with public key cryptography so you know who wrote it and what about. That way, you get an idea of how much support a paper has and, crucially, what kinds of people support it. The author of the paper puts up the most credible supportive reviews they can find. In theory, if it becomes accepted then there’ll no longer be any need for conventional publication. It’s a very clever system. (See also, the more established ResearchBlogging.org – which Gashler says could be complementary to GPeerReview but covers rather different ground. I think I agree with him on that — it’d be great to see things like that running it tandem.)

I’d love to see something like this made to work across academia. I suspect, though, that what kills it will be that real people don’t understand nerd stuff like public key cryptography. Everyone else in my research unit gets all annoyed if I try to use LaTeX or Bibtex at them. (Well, the dentists do — the other physicists love it. I witnessed a long argument about a week ago over the relative merits of Microsoft Project versus the open source alternative, which boiled down in the end to ‘well the free software probably is better but if we collaborate with anyone else they’ll demand we use Project’ which to me seems like a really crappy way of doing things — I’d rather piss people off by doing the right thing than pander to idiots and help keep Microsoft’s monopoly on proprietary, buggy software healthy.) They act as if Word and EndNote are somehow better. In my experience, Word doesn’t work properly and EndNote formats citations basically at random. LaTeX is a pig to get set up but at least once you’ve done it it stays set up. To be honest, I think that’s another thing that needs sorting: we need a specialist scientific markup language. Maybe a form of HTML (or other XML), with a standard equation format and a few extra specialised tags, perhaps including COinS for citations, which the reader software could be configured to render as a conventional reference, or as a hyperlink, or as whatever they like. A CSS-like ‘default’ style for a particular paper would be fair enough, but the current system that forcibly changes the format depending on which journal happens to have published the paper is rather silly. I don’t want a stack of PDF files all formatted differently. I want a folder full of pictures and ASCII-encoded markup that I can process and output how I like. Get into the twenty-first century. That’s how we do things here, because it’s a better way of doing it.

And there’s no reason that all of the above couldn’t be implemented really very easily, and I’d love to see peer review evolve into something more open and transparent than the existing system, which still relies on the trustworthiness of journal editors and the word of a few unidentified reviewers per paper. But we need nice, simple user interfaces on every part of it or else Joe Scientist isn’t going to actually bother to do it. We need a nice WYSIWYG program to edit the papers, then a nice Wordpress-style package to maintain your site, and a nice package to let you write reviews without much effort. Make it simple, and people might adopt it. Which is frustrating, because by rights you’d think a good scientist would be exactly the kind of person who would leap at the chance to adopt an open, collaborative, technological and free solution to a problem. Those are the qualities that science runs on. And I can’t see what we’d lose by switching to such a system, other than a load of jobs at journal publishers — and I’m sure the big journals would find a way to adapt. Perhaps they’d act as aggregators or run interesting comment pieces more often or something. (I should link to this very interesting discussion, where Gashler explains what journals do that is useful and that GPeerReview doesn’t do. I’m not convinced it’s all really a job for journals per se, but someone will have to keep doing all that. Personally, I think universities should do most of it.)

Bah. I just get frustrated when people cling to what they know instead of adopting obviously better alternatives, like Linux or metric or atheism or not torturing people. I guess that’s just a failing I have. But I’d love to know how any of the above could be shoehorned into the modern scientific community.

Christian Scientists Split God

A group of Christian research scientists in Massachusetts announced this week that they had managed for the first time to split God, also known as the Higgs particle although mostly to annoy physicists, into his component parts. God is believed to have existed in the conditions immediately prior to the Big Bang.

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water. A team of 5 priests work round the clock blessing the inbound pipelines. Researchers were able to detect two of God’s components in the debris from the explosion.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The trace from the Holy Smoke Chamber clearly shows a trail for the son particle, which curves gracefully through the chamber for five nanoseconds before ascending into heaven, more-or-less in line with the theory. The father particle’s trace, however, did not agree with calculated predictions. The researchers have admitted that the way the father particle moves is ‘mysterious’, but are confident an explanation will be found. The holy spirit particle was not observed. The Christian scientists believe that this particle passed clean through the chamber like a ghost.

Most Christian scientists agree that the father and son particles could tell us a lot about the universe if we can unlock their secrets. The experiments have been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out life on Earth.

DCSF delight as exam results show which pupils are stupid

Schools minister Ed Balls has expressed his delight at a ‘mixed bag’ of exam results, which he says ‘accurately show which pupils are clever and which are a bit stupid.’ When the results were announced, Gordon Brown described them as ‘disappointing,’ saying that ‘we had hoped more students might achieve the top grades,’ but Balls now claims that the purpose of exams is to gauge the different ability of students in various subjects and that a good distribution of grades, including fails, is needed to accomplish this.

‘This is absolute nonsense,’ said Beverley Hughes in an interview earlier today. ‘The purpose of testing students is to demonstrate how wildly successful our education reforms have been. We had been looking forward to another year of record-breaking exam results, and the exciting possibility of introducing a new top-grade to cope with the number of pupils achieving A* at GCSE, but now the system has been hijacked by teachers who just want to know how their students are doing.’ Insiders say the planned introduction of the new grade, tentatively named ‘AA1*+’ was intended to be a much-publicised event designed to underline the runaway success of both students and the Labour Party. The introduction has been put on hold pending an improvement in exam grades.

Employers have praised the latest results, saying that their similarity to the previous years’ results will make it easier to compare job applicants who sat them in different years, as well as clearly showing which pupils are habitual underachievers and should not be considered for important jobs. It is even thought that preventing stupid people from entering highly paid and responsible jobs could help the economy in the long term, and employers have been looking for a system of doing just that for many years, but Children’s minister Delyth Morgan has said that national exam results should not be used in this way. ‘This isn’t what they were designed to do. They are purely a tool for demonstrating the achievements of our department and the government in general.’ Some employers have gone so far as to suggest that some government ministers have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo in which unqualified and incompetent people can remain in well paid, high-power jobs simply by engineering a series of spuriously inflated exam results. Ed Balls has strenuously denied these rumours, citing a government spreadsheet which would ‘authoritatively debunk these rumours’ had he not left the CD on a bus.

Analogue Switchoff: Your Questions Answered

Will I need to get a new TV?

No. In most cases you will need to purchase a digital receiver box to plug into your existing set. This will enable you to receive digital broadcasts after analogue is turned off. Most analogue TV will be switched off by 2011, but your area may differ.

Will I need to get a new radio?

Eventually. Analogue radio is being continued longer than analogue TV. No date has yet been set for this but sometime around 2015 seems likely. When this happens you will need to purchase a ‘DAB’ Digital Radio.

Will I need to get a new clock?

Yes. When analogue time is turned off in 2020, old-style analogue clocks will stop working. You will need to upgrade to a digital clock to enable you to continue telling the time. You will probably already own a digital clock as it will be built into your digital radio.

What other analogue products will need replacing?

If for some reason you still own a video cassette recorder, you will need to replace it with a Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player. You will also be unable to play vinyl records and audio cassettes and will need to replace these with digital media such as MP3s or CDs.

Is there anything else I should know?

In 2025, analogue description will be turned off. Among other changes, you will no longer be able to describe the height of a person by gesturing and saying ‘about this high’. You will need to give a figure. You may continue give this figure in feet and inches as long as you also provide a metric estimate. For reference, six feet is approximately 1.5m, and two inches is roughly 0.05m.

Atheist Buses to be followed by Agnostic Trams, Troubled Billboards

Following the success of the so-called “Atheist Bus” campaign, other irreligious groups have launched similar efforts. The atheist message being plastered across buses throughout Britain reads “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Next week sees the launch of the “Agnostic Tram”, which bears the message “I don’t know if there’s a god - I’m just a tram.” The group behind the “Troubled Billboard” has not yet managed to agree on a wording, but the current favoured text is “There must be more to life than just this, but there’s so much bad stuff in the world… oh, why is it so complicated? I just try to be nice, what else can you do?”. The organisers had hoped to get a bus advert too, but it rapidly became apparent that there simply wouldn’t be enough space.

Commuters in Huddersfield have recently started seeing adverts in train stations which say “We don’t know if we actually believe in God, but we are spiritual”. In one case, this advert is running right next to one that reads “I don’t know whether or not there’s a God, but there definitely aren’t any Thetans.” Nobody yet knows who paid for the double-page advert in Monday’s Telegraph which simply stated “oh, God, I’m so depressed.”

Surprisingly, a recent MORI poll asking which religious beliefs were most common found that most Britons agreed with the statement “I don’t care enough either way that I feel I have to paint it on a bus”.

Civilian deaths in Gaza. More soon.

UN Troops Help Woman With Own Personal Battle Against Cancer

Long-term cancer patient Amanda Myers, 42, was surprised earlier this month when fifty UN troops arrived in her hospital ward to help with what had previously been her own personal battle against cancer. Also surprised were the soldiers, who had previously been deployed keeping the peace in the Middle East. ‘They didn’t seem to know why they were there,’ said Myers. ‘They’ve been very helpful, though. Supportive and always happy to pop to the shops when I need something.’

President of the UN Security Council Jean-Maurice Ripart told the press that after accusations that the UN did nothing about the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, the UN was keen to regain popularity by fighting something that everyone would support. What happened next is unclear, but it is known that the council discussed removing a rogue head of state, but had difficulty coming up with anybody suitably unpopular. After a number of names were dismissed as either only ambiguously dangerous or too obscure, the British delegate suggested cancer, having forgotten that English humour is not always understood by other nations.

A representative of the hospital where Myers is being treated said ’strictly, we’re not supposed to allow visitors to stay in the ward 24/7, but when I explained this to the sergeant, he said “I don’t think so, Sir” and didn’t move. In the end we just let them stay. They haven’t caused any problems, apart from the two trasnsplant patients killed last week by friendly fire.’

So far, the UN say, the tumour in Myers’ lung has ’stubbornly refused to negotiate’, but they remain confident of victory.

Terrorist changes mind after seeing atheist bus advert

Police were called to a bus in London yesterday after a man was seen emptying an unidentified liquid onto the floor of the vehicle. Witnesses say he then dropped the bag and ran out of the bus laughing. Police analysis confirmed that the liquid was an explosive mixture of flour and peroxide which the would-be terrorist had apparently chosen not to detonate.

‘I spotted him as soon as he got on the bus,’ one witness said. ‘He looked troubled and was carrying a large bag. He seemed to get more and more agitated until he ripped open his bag, jumped out of his seat, and got off as quickly as he could at the next set of traffic lights.’

Following a brief investigation, police believe the man was an Islamic fundamentalist, most likely working alone, who was plotting to blow up the bus in protest at supposedly immoral western culture, but when getting onto the bus had read the advert on the side which says ‘there’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

The man has not yet been identified, but someone matching his description was seen that evening, sitting in the corner of a strip club with a bottle of tequila and a copy of ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’.

Bush refuses to let Obama move into Blair House early

“I know the feeling” - Gordon Brown

Crop circle found that says ‘there probably is’.

OfCom say Prince Harry video ‘outside remit’

Despite receiving hundreds of complaints, OfCom have refused to rule on the alleged racial slur in a video made by Prince Harry three years ago and released recently by the News of the World, claiming that home videos are not subject to their guidelines.

One complaint, leaked to newspapers, reads ‘I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about the despicable language used by “Prince” Harry in the recent programme “That Video He Made”. Although I myself am not in Harry’s squad and did not see the events in question, I found the seven seconds of out-of-context commentary which I read about in a reputable newspaper [sic] three years later deeply offensive, and I would like to know what measures will be put in place to prevent it happening again.’ OfCom described the letter as ‘typical’.

Prince Harry, who made the offending remark, has already issued a statement saying that the term was used ‘without malice’ and ‘as a nickname’. However, in an interview with BBC News the soldier’s uncle, who wasn’t there, has never met Harry, and knows only what his nephew chooses to tell him about their relationship, claims otherwise.

The Daily Express has already announced that it intends to escalate the incident to the level of Scandal, and claims to have found a series of similar incidents involving racist remarks or actions by other members of the royal family. A spokesperson for the palace told reporters that he thought it ‘highly unlikely’ that the newspaper had unearthed such events, describing the royals as ‘highly reputable members of the international community’ who ‘would not engage in racism or stereotyping.’

Scientists admit Hadron Collider created Financial Black Hole

New compression algorithm discards information listeners are too uncouth to appreciate

Apple have launched a new compression algorithm developed to further extend the capacity of their iPod music players. The format, called XF2, works by discarding any information that the listener won’t appreciate anyway. For example, the best selling XF2 file at the moment is Alexandra Burke’s cover of Hallelujah, which when compressed contains no Biblical imagery or dark undertones at all.

Audiophiles have been outraged by the announcement and are boycotting the new technology, however the general public have warmed to it immensely. One user told reporters “it’s great; I’ve managed to get the entire back catalogue of Girls Aloud, Hearsay and Britney Spears onto my iPod, and there’s still loads of space left.” A spokesperson for Apple commented on this review saying “what’s really good is that in this case the algorithm produces lossless compression, because there was never really anything to that music to begin with. This allows the system to shrink the songs greatly without losing anything. Many so-called ‘boy band’ songs can actually be reconstituted entirely just from the titles.”

Some users have got more out of it than others. Michael Simon, a builder from Oldham, has found that most songs are very small files that download very fast, but Jason Cockburn, a writer from London, says that the music he downloads seems hardly to have compressed at all, with the exception of Don McClean’s American Pie. “That’s probably because it’s a stupid nonsense song anyway,” he said.

Apple have admitted the new system does still have some bugs: currently the algorithm crashes when trying to compress Bohemian Rhapsody.

The name ‘XF2′ does not stand for anything. In production the project had a much longer, cleverer name which was a reference to Dante, but that name has not been announced because the press release was XF2 encoded and it was felt that journalists wouldn’t get it.

Atheist bus on collision course with Church

Could Apple Juice Be Cure For Hiccups?

According to Professor David Cook of Durham University, the answer may be ‘yes’. The discovery was made yesterday, when Cook had hiccups and noticed they were gone later that afternoon. In an exclusive interview secured by chance in a bar, he said “I don’t know what did it. Possibly they just went away on their own. I know I’d had a glass of apple juice. I suppose that might have helped.”

This ground-breaking clinical research offers hope to millions of sufferers worldwide, and nutritionist Patrick Holford has already launched his own range of apple-juice based pills which you should buy. In a press-release, he said that healthy adults should probably drink fifteen glasses of apple juice every two hours or, failing that, take just one of his ‘Cidex’ brand apple-juice supplements.

Holford explains that the active ingredient in apples is the cell wall, which is much thicker than the membrane in human cells and therefore stronger. This means that the cells can be used to strengthen aspects of the human body such as the immune system, allowing patients to naturally fight off viruses such as the hiccups.

Sufferers of the hiccups are already demanding access to this new cure on the NHS, but NICE have remained adamant, saying that the treatment is unproven and therefore not cost effective. Newly founded support group JUICE has described this as ‘blatant bias and discrimination’ against sufferers of ‘a serious disease which is often under-reported’. They say that experimental treatments such as this should be made available automatically.

If you would like more information on where to get this amazing new medicine, contact Cidex Ltd. immediately, on 0845 123 4789.

Mostly it is about the Islamic world and the culture and people thereof rather than Islam itself (the Islamic people seem uniquely incapable of distinguishing these concepts), but there are a couple of encouraging comments from Mohammed in holy texts that can’t have hurt (although the program doesn’t address other parts of scripture that may have the opposite effect) and an interesting idea about the Q’uran helping out. The idea is that Arabic was rolled out as a universal language to help people understand the book in its original form, and Arabic was modified to make it clearer so that people didn’t misinterpret it. That doubtless helped science, albeit by accident, by enabling easy, unambiguous communication. (It’s interesting that Christianity didn’t feel the need to make their message unambiguous — indeed, until recently they deliberately obfuscated it by translating it into dead languages. I think they only stopped because it was too much like hard work.)

Right now the presenter, Jim Al-Khalili, is talking to a so-called “wise woman” who has a wide variety of herbal and similar remedies. I assume he’s just being polite, but It appears not to have occured to him that they might not work. To my eyes, that proves nothing at all to do with science. That could just as easily be superstition. It becomes science when you test it. It’s a blurry line when you’re talking about the early proto-science of the eighth century, but the fact that she’s still selling this stuff in the twenty-first doesn’t seem to have put him off his “Science And Islam Walking Hand In Hand” thesis. And now he is reading from a book which says epilepsy is caused by evil spirits. “Hardly scientific,” he says, “but Islam’s most tangible contribution to medicine is less in its specific remedies and more in its overarching philosophy. It is, after all, a religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans”. No, it’s just a religion. Like all religions, it contains loads of different ideas, many of which are perfectly horrid, and adherants can choose to focus on any of them that they fancy.

I know Islam has had some bad press lately, but you won’t fix that by trying to give it the credit for any and all achievements made by its followers or their subjects. Marcus du Sautoy managed to cover much of the same ground on the same channel without as far as I recall mentioning Islam. (I imagine he probably mentioned it in passing.) That should be a clue as to how important it was. Another interesting quote from Dr Bennison just now: “it was not the case [in ninth century debates] that people were expected to adhere to a particular line or adopt a particular religion. They were allowed to express their own sentiments and their own views very freely. The point was that they should do so in elegant Arabic and in good logical reasoning”. Compare and contrast that to the reaction to the cartoons of Mohammed, an arguably quite important side of Islam that the program utterly fails to mention. Where did “butcher those who insult Islam” come from? Why should I credit Islam with the former and not blame it for the latter?

This sort of thing bothers me because it kind of spoils an otherwise interesting documentary, and because if we confuse a religion with its followers then any meaningful debate is impossible. You can’t argue against an idea if that argument is seen as an attack on the people who hold that idea (or other similar ones, since the term “Islam” can cover a multitude of sins). I think that if you call a show “Science And Islam” then it should be about the relationship between science and Islam, not about the growth of science in the Islamic world (that show should clearly be called “Science of Arabia”), and as part of that I expect you to mention that the influence of Islam on science has at times been to hinder it. Granted I’ve only seen one episode, but even if that is redressed in future episodes, I shouldn’t have to watch a whole series to get balance.

The program now ends with the observation that “the first great achievment of the medieval Islamic scientists was to prove that science isn’t Islamic… Science… transcends political borders and religious affiliations”. Which is true only in the rather weak sense that science remains true no matter which parts of it you elect to ignore: science is not Islamic, and crucially, Islam is not scientific.

That’s just not on. Apart from the fact that creationism is anti-science enough without trying to trump psychology as well as biology, geology and astrophysics, this kind of thing is displacing real therapy that can actually prevent these deaths. But the hell with that — why bother preventing deaths if they can be used to promote an ideology?

An obvious question that may have entered your brain by now is “what on Earth does creationism have to do with suicide prevention?” and the answer is of course “nothing”, so a better question is “what does Chaplain Biscotti think creationism has to do with suicide prevention?”. Well. Apparently he has identified a Problem:

• In the last two years, completed suicides have escalated throughout the Air Force
• …
• The Air Force did not use spirituality as part of their suicide prevention briefing until 2005

It seems that he read that and thought that the solution was to add more spirituality. I cannot fathom how even the most religiously retarded mind could reach that conclusion from that evidence. So what’s his solution?

Dr. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life,  provides a powerful model for Suicide Prevention, developing leaders, and making troops combat ready and effective.

No, it provides a pack of bullshit. (I haven’t read it, but I can easily surmise it’s a load of rubbish from the fact that Rick Warren wrote it.) After that are a series of laughably inept slides that are reproduced in the Kos article so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say that atheism (specifically, humanism) is equated with selfishness and then The Dreaded Communism, to the point where Darwin is inexplicably listed as one of the leaders of the USSR. It also uses the story of Pat Tillman, an atheist (as far as we know) who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, to push the idea of faith in general, including faith in oneself. That’s probably basically good advice, were it not displacing real therapy and attached to the rest of this pro-Christianity propaganda.

Chaplain Biscotti is not the Crackpot of the Month. That honour falls to those in secular roles above him, who allow and promote this, who push religion both as a way of reducing suicide and in general. I’m starting with Rod Bishop who seems to have compiled the presentation that contained Biscotti’s slides. Beyond that it seems to be so systemic as to make naming names as pointless as it is impossible.

Luckily the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing the US Military over this. How that lawsuit will go is unclear. I have no idea what the rules are on such things, not that that has anything to do with the result of any lawsuit with religion anywhere near it.

[BPSDB]

• Large Hadron Collider ‘may destroy universe’, say stupid people (original submission)
• Department for Children, Schools and Families to ‘give up on schools’ (original submission)
• Labour to use ‘guest leaders’ (original submission)
• Halloween update; local youths ‘less frightening than usual’ (original submission)
• Book of phone numbers ‘left on doorstep’ (original submission)

(I do like my headlines-with-quotes-in.)

Next, some of the ones they didn’t. I’ll put most of them after the fold, since there are a lot of them. Also, some might be offensive if you’re easily offended. First, though, my favourite, from early to mid October:

Gordon Brown has new kitchen sink installed under anti-terrorism laws

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had his kitchen refitted under laws brought in in the wake of the September 11th and July 7th terrorist attacks.

The refit was proposed in August, as part of a larger reorganisation of Number 10. Brown’s wife Sarah raised objections to the plans at an early stage, saying that the new system would make cooking difficult and that she didn’t like the colour. It seemed that the deadlock was unresolvable until September 17th, when the Prime Minister realised he could use existing anti-terror laws to push the installation through without first gaining his wife’s approval.

Critics have claimed that this is “a clear abuse” of the power handed to the PM’s office by these new rules. One backbench MP said that while he understood the need to have special new measures to deal with the new kind of threat faced today, the government had taken advantage of the fear to pass laws granting themselves more power than they had ever been elected to. Other recent applications of the anti-terror laws include freezing the assets of Iceland UK, resolving the double-booking of a conference room in Parliament, and the emergency resolution on Tuesday which mandated it was James’ turn to do the washing up.

Brown has insisted that neither he nor the government has abused the trust placed in them by Parliament, saying that there are “other kinds of terrorism” besides violent attacks on civilians, and that these might be said to include refusal to wash dishes or bad taste in kitchen units.

The House of Lords is expected to overturn the decision, but James Brown has said that as he’s already done the washing up, it’s too late to reverse the damage and a system must be put in place to prevent these situations from arising in the first place.

Morrisons to launch own-brand Marks and Spencer

Supermarket chain Morrisons has announced plans to launch an ‘own-brand’ version of rival Marks and Spencer’s shops. The new stores, called ‘Morris And Sons’, will build on Morrisons’ existing corporate identity, the large green ‘M’, via the addition of an ampersand and an ‘S’. They aim to capture some of Marks and Spencer’s richer market by offering similarly high-class products at slightly lower prices. The new shops are expected to be opened right next to existing Marks and Spencer stores, and look similar enough that customers may enter the wrong one by mistake if they are not paying close attention. The chairman of Morrisons said, ‘this is my M&S.’

While the move has been praised by the Monopolies Commission, who have long felt that Marks and Spencer currently have an unfair dominance for the market of Marks and Spencer products, critics have complained that the culture of supermarket own-brand imitations has gone too far this time. One lawyer has even condemned the move as ‘blatant passing off’, but representatives of Marks and Spencer maintain that their customers are not about to desert the brand for a competitor. Officials have warned that if own-brand Marks and Spencers become commonplace then the term ‘M&S’ could become generic, like Xerox, Hoover or Sellotape, and simply be a word that any company could use to describe produce which is not as posh as it thinks it is. Marks and Spencer are reportedly working on an advert for this eventuality which begins ‘this is not just M&S chicken…’

Some people have expressed fears that if the plans are allowed to go ahead then high streets may consist of nothing other than Tesco versions of popular chains as early as 2015. Experts insist that there is no evidence that this will happen, pointing to America as an example, where a chain of ‘Frankie & Johnnie McDonald’s Steakhouse’ restaurants has been operating for years without incident.

‘Shit’ to be upgraded to Class B swear-word.

After massive public outrage at increasing use of the word ’shit’, often by children as young as eight, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is set to announce plans to upgrade it to a class B swear-word. In her speech, Smith is expected to criticise the current cursing classifications as “archaic”, citing such oddities as thumb biting, seen in Shakespeare but rare in modern Britain and still considered a class C curse in the eyes of the law, and the fact that ‘punani’ is still not listed on the legislation.

There are also plans to crack down on rogue cursers who supplant their swear-words by ‘cutting’ them using harmless letters (producing variants like the increasingly popular ‘feck’), or more dangerous punctuation marks or characters from Wingdings or Zapf Dingbats.

There is growing concern among parents that ’shit’, while not particularly offensive in its own right, may lead on to the use of “harder” curses such as ‘fuck’ or the middle finger. Some are afriad that their children may experiment with dangerous cocktails of powerful swear-words such as ’sheep-shagging motherfucking cunt’. However, others have argued that making ’shit’ less acceptable will do nothing but increase its strength. “The whole appeal of swearing is that it’s a taboo,” said one representative. “If you try to regulate it, that will only encourage people. Surely we all remember what happened whet the government tried to classify ‘knob’ as a class C swear-word. Use sky-rocketed and we lost a generation of stand-up comedians. Since it was declassified and isn’t considered offensive any more, nobody bothers to say it much.” This point is addressed in the text of the Home Secretary’s statement, citing the drop in use of the word ‘nigger’ as a success story for the legislation.

Civil rights campaigners have also slammed the plans, claiming that the right to free speech means that citizens can use any words they like and in any order, provided that it is not libellous or fraudulent.

Parliament has not yet unveiled plans to close the loophole which allows elaborate innuendo, but a certain member is expected to push through such a crackdown in the near future.

(alternate, more offensive headline: ‘Cunt’ to be upgraded to ‘B-Word’.)

Britain to Jacqui Smith: “We were being sarcastic” (probably makes no sense now)

London to host 2012 Olympics in Second Life

The chair of the London 2012 Organising Committee Sebastian Coe, has announced that the stadium where most events will take place is being built inside the Second Life computer game world. The game world has previously hosted conferences and meetings and some real-world companies have offices there. However, this is the first time a major public sporting event has been held entirely within a virtual universe. The virtual stadium will be able to seat 80,000 spectator ‘avatars’, and of course those without Second Life characters will be able to watch on TV. Second Life was chosen over the game world of World of Warcraft to prevent athletes from using performance-enhancing potions such as Swiftness.

London Mayor Boris Johnson hailed the plans as innovative, and said they show that Britain and London are leading the world in embracing the future and online culture, but fellow Conservative Ann Widdecombe said in her Daily Express column that it was a stunt, “a shameless failure to live up to Britain’s promise when we bid for the games, and to just fob the IOC and the world off with something cheaper instead”. Her party leader David Cameron dismissed this opinion, however. Speaking on Webcameron, he said that the modern Conservative Party was excited by the new possibilities made open by the technology, and said that his Second Life avatar, Secameron, had already reserved a seat. Johnson made the speech from a podium outside his Second Life HQ. His avatar is a tall, confident man in a business suit, with neat, black hair in a left parting and a large and conspicuous pair of blue horns which he hasn’t worked out how to delete.

Many athletes have objected to the plans, saying that their years of training will be useless in Second Life, but Coe said in an interview that the Internet was the future, and that that might mean traditional skills become obsolete. Johnson answered the criticism less deftly, saying “well, maybe you should have learned to do something more useful than throwing a heavy frisbee a long way”. His office later clarified the remark in a press release, but former discus champion Carl Myerscough whose avatar attended the event later said “I would have pelted him with eggs if I knew what button did that”.

McCain and Palin to host Countdown

John McCain and Sarah Palin, the failed Republican contendors for the White House, have been signed to present the next series of Countdown, say sources close to the programme. “After Des O’Connor and Carol Vorderman quit the show, we’d been hunting for a new pair to replace them. We needed an older man and a woman about Carol’s age who our viewers would find attractive but not intimidatingly so. And they should know each other and have some chemistry. After months of auditions, we turned on the TV and were shocked to see the perfect pair running for election.”

McCain released a statement confirming the leak, saying “When I first got the offer, I thought it was for MSNBC’s Countdown, currently hosted by Keith Olbermann. It seemed like a good opportunity to tone down the network’s rampant liberal bias. Then they flew me to a state called ‘Yorkshire’ for the audition and I realised my mistake.”

Reporters were also shown a copy of the tape from the audition. McCain is said to have not really grasped what the show was about or who it was aimed at, and viewers responded well to that, because it represented strong continuity. Palin performed well in the letters game, and better than expected in the numbers. In the first round she failed to make the target of 270, but by the end of the show she had found her form. Faced with a 75, a 10, a 4, two 7s and a 1, and a target of 689, she drew a complex-looking diagram on the board made up mostly of numbers, arrows, and arithmetical operator symbols, and explained, “Well, it’s like my momma always said, when you have the sevens, and a four, and you see what you do with them and you multiply… you multiply the numbers, and you pray, and all of them just really come together beautifully so that when you get down to it it’s really a matter of whether you want to make 689 or not.” Then she cocked her head to one side and squinted at the audience to see whether they had understood. 80% of the audience found this ‘not at all different’ to Carol’s performance.

Producers had hoped to test McCain’s ability to handle a Crucial Countdown Conundrum, but one contestant had ammassed a large lead in the early stages of the contest and there was never really any chance that it would go down to the wire.

Vatican City on international watch list

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office was forced to admit last night that the Vatican City had for some time been the subject of international security amid rising fears of religiously-motivated terrorism.

‘We have a number of criteria for these decisions,’ he said, ‘and the Vatican City meets many of them. It is a real cause for concern.’ He went on to point out that only people who subscribe to the national religion - Catholicism - are allowed to work in the Vatican City. Homosexuals are not permitted to work there either. ‘This is not what we can reasonably call a free or democratic nation. It has no education or healthcare infrastructure, and has some very strange laws about celibacy.’

There are also fears that the state may be a harbour for fascism: the Vatican was declared an independent nation in 1929 by the Lateran treaty, signed into law by Benito Mussolini, and recently appointed a former member of the Hitler Youth its leader in a secret vote between only a small number of men. The Vatican has never participated in any kind of international dialogue, and sources say that any official negotiation between it and the United States may be unconstitutional. Sympathisers with the Vatican are barred by law from becoming UK royalty.

It was also confirmed that the country has thousands of cells of ‘devoted followers’ scattered around the world, including in the United Kingdom, however reporters were assured that neither the UK or the US is planning an invasion.

More worryingly, there are reports that Tony Blair has recently been associated with the ‘rogue state’.

Woolworths now worth less than wool.

Man who cut off own hand to free himself ‘would have been okay anyway’

Following a car accident on a country lane, keen mountainclimber Liam Richards and nephew John, 19, became trapped in their vehicle on Tuesday. With no signal on his mobile phone and unable to escape the vehicle, Richards eventually resorted to using his penknife to amputate has own left hand, which was pinned between two crushed panels. ‘I’d seen people on TV who’d done it, and I thought, “I could do that.”‘ He then ran to the nearest telephone box to raise the alarm. According to Dave Moore, the first paramedic who attended the scene, ‘Mr Richards was incredibly brave. I don’t know how many other people could have done what he did,’ but added ‘of course, a local woman had seen the accident and alerted us already, so he would have been fine anyway. Still though, wow.’

‘I saw his car swerve off the road and hit the tree from my kitchen. Straight away I dialled 999 and told them to come right away,’ said local Margaret Houseman. ‘I tried to get his attention, but then I saw him cutting off his arm and I had to sit down for a bit. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know any first aid anyway.’ Paramedics say that Mr Richards’ hand was not badly damaged, but due to the way he had severed it, it would not be possible to reattach it.

Also in the car was John Richards, who was instantly killed upon impact. Peers at his school have described him as ‘annoying’, and ‘not one of the more popular boys’. His teachers said that he ‘rarely paid attention’ and ‘consistently underachieved’. The car had been travelling from a nearby town after a shopping trip, an activity the family say the pair ‘did not particularly enjoy’. Richards said they hadn’t bought anything special that day, ‘just some clothes and stuff.’

Asked about the need for such trees to be removed from the sides of rural roads to prevent such events in the future, John’s mother, Sylvia, issued a statement saying ‘you can’t save everybody all of the time. Obviously we’re all shocked by John’s tragic death, but overprotecting everyone will not help in the long run.’

The car was a 1996 Nissan Micra, which Richards described as ‘basically okay’ and ‘easily replaceable’.

Wikipedia user sets new world record time

Wikipedia user “90.196.252.184″ is celebrating today after breaking the men’s world record for updating Wikipedia after a major world event.

The Wikipedia page “100 metres” was updated to reflect Usain Bolt’s historic race only 9.69 seconds after the race ended. The previous record was set earlier in the year on July 7th when user CoolKid1993 updated the encyclopaedia to reflect Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the Democratic nomination race only 9.74 seconds after her sentence ended.

90.196.252.184 has so far been unavailable for comment, but a statement issued on his User:Talk page simply curses himself for failing to log-on to the website and claim the record under his preferred name.

The record has been ratified by Wikipedia’s controllers, however an appeal has been launched by user 218.186.13.2, who claims that 90.196.252.184’s time should be disregarded because he misspelt “Beijing” in the record table halfway down the article. CoolKid1993 has refused to endorse or oppose the appeal, standing by his initial statement that he always knew the record would be broken and is excited at the talent coming up through the Wikipedia registration page.

Nobody has yet bothered to set a women’s record.

Gordon Brown spending all day replying to e-petitions

Over the last year, in an attempt to connect with younger voters, the Prime Minister’s office has set up a comprehensive interactive website, as well a Twitter feed and pages on Facebook and Flickr. A source inside 10 Downing Street has told reporters that Gordon Brown now spends ‘most of his time’ tending to these services and profiles.

“It took a while for him to get to grips with all the services, but once he did it was impossible to get him off them. We had hoped that other staff would keep them up to date, but Gordon insisted on doing it himself. Now he spends most afternoons responding to e-petitions.”

The Government has not officially responded to this, although the Downing Street Twitter profile did post an update to explain that the Prime Minister felt it was important to connect with the population as directly as possible. Some, however, have expressed concern that it may be his way of hiding from reality. “Brown has 72 friends on the Downing Street Facebook page, which is far more than he has in Parliament. That said, many of them are clearly gimmick accounts. We know for a fact that he’s never actually met anyone called Jesus H Christ.” Brown’s Facebook page lists him as “in a special relationship”.

There have also been accusations that the new digital services are a waste of money. The amount of updates on the sites in total is thought to be a major drain on government time, especially since most of the Twitter updates are 135-140 characters long, suggesting that Brown spends several minutes crafting each one.

According to a note posted on the Downing Street Blog, the blame for this situation rests firmly with the media, whose incessant nagging two years ago forced all politicians to purchase iPods to fill with music which was more popular than them.

US National Debt mysteriously ‘rolls round’ to zero

At 2:41 yesterday afternoon, panic gripped the White House as the National Debt reached nine trillion, nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars for the first time in the nation’s history. Officials immediately set about drawing up a raft of proposals to fix the problem, including tax increases, spending cuts and the invasion of Switzerland, but at 3:07 a junior staffer working in Times Square phoned and pointed out that actually the national debt stood at only a few hundred dollars, one of the lowest on Earth.

At first President Bush did not believe the news, and immediately flew out to New York to check the clock for himself. Some aides attempted to explain that the debt could be more accurately checked within the White House, but Bush insisted that he liked to get his information the same way the American People get theirs. One staff member is reported to have insisted that there will be plenty of time for that in February, but the President’s resolve was characteristically strong. At a press conference, he told reporters that this new era of prosperity spelled an end to the fears of foreclosure faced by millions of Americans and that his vision and the $700bn financial bailout should be credited with the reversal in the nation’s economic situation.

One journalist at the press conference asked if it was possible that the debt had “run out of digits and rolled round to zero”, to which the President responded that complex issues like the economy never have just one cause. “The design of the clock may have been a factor,” he conceded, “but it was [his] decisions and leadership that pushed it over the edge.”

Bush has promised a wave of tax cuts and spending increases in order to make sure that Americans see the benefits of the new solvency in the budget, however President-Elect Barack Obama has announced that he intends to reverse these, claiming that the reduction in debt is somehow “an illusion”. Early polling figures suggest that Obama’s popularity dropped seven points following the announcement.

Outbreak ‘could have been prevented’ by rubber tongue cleaners

The World Health Organisation has said that the cause of the recent outbreak which killed nearly a million people in the poorest parts of Africa was a tongue-borne virus which could have been prevented had these people had access to basic vital medical supplies such as toothbrushes with little rubberised tongue-cleaners on the back.

‘People don’t realise how vital these tongue-cleaners are,’ said the spokesperson. ‘They think they’re just a gimmick cooked up to sell more toothbrushes after people got wise to the whole “flexible neck” fad. But the truth is that a dirty tongue can be disastrous for your health. Remember that everything you eat goes over your tongue. In many ways, it’s simply a miracle that mankind survived this long without this technology.’

He went on to explain that he considered it ‘imperative’ to make tongue-cleaning brushes available to everyone, and has joined forces with the WWF to make this technology available to the animal kingdom. ‘Most animals have some form of tongue and yet only mankind have developed a pimpled rubber pad to clean it with. It is surely our sacred duty to provide this to our brethren in other species, before they are decimated by germs that live on the tongue and inside the cheeks, and those hard-to-reach places around the gumline.’

Fox News: Obama to end ‘pork barrel’ citing rules of Halal.

Trading halted as wasp enters London Stock Exchange

The credit crunch looks set to worsen today as news emerges that trading has been suspended on the floor of the Stock Exchange due to a wasp which has been loose above the exchange floor for the last four hours.

It is thought that the insect got into the building on the coat of a licensed broker, but authorities have yet to name a suspect. Trading had been in full force until shortly after lunchtime, at which point investor Brian Jameson “thought he heard something”. At first he suspected some kind of electrical fault, but ruled that out when he noticed the sound was moving.

When traders started to realise that there was a wasp in the room, they started to head for the exits, wary of being stung on the trading floor. This has lead to a situation known in financial circles as “a bee market”.

Some companies are, however, benefiting from the incident: those who trade on the Internet are reporting ’significantly’ less competition, and there are reports of a single investor still on the floor, who appears to be doing quite well for himself. So far, the wasp has stayed away from him, although nobody can guarantee how long his luck might hold. This has lead to speculation by some analysts that the wasp may have been introduced deliberately in order to reduce his competition.

Authorities now say that the wasp is buzzing about behind one of the large screens in place to show current stock prices, and is impossible to access. “It would be easy if we unplugged the screen,” they admitted, “but it’s been there ages and we’re not sure where all the wires go any more. Anyway, that one guy is still using it.” At present, there is no way to know how long the danger may last, or how much it could affect the value of British companies.

“At Least We’re Not Falling Into The Sea”, says North (also probably no longer makes sense)

Doctor, Liverpool fail to regenerate

Common maths errors “should be accepted”

According to an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement by Ken Smith, Professor of Criminology at Bucks New University, university lecturers should stop correcting the most common mathematical errors in students’ work and simply accept them as “variant” answers.

“Why shouldn’t 57 be a prime number?” he asks. “It looks like one, and a lot of my students think that it is. Surely that gives it as good a claim to be prime as any other number?”

Other proposals to “simplify” mathematics in his article include making 0÷0 equal to one, truncating π to four decimal places — 3.1415 — since that’s all anyone can remember, accepting “proof by example” as mathematically valid, and allowing students to “cancel the d” in calculus questions.

“I’ve seen mathematics teachers repeatedly correcting the same error in the same student’s work, and yet the problem would be solved if they simply accepted the 10 commonest errors as correct.

“Mathematics teachers are just too uptight about the subject to allow any change. Would it hurt them so much if 0.9 recurring was strictly less than one? That would seem pretty sensible to me.”

Scientists calculate formula for the perfect number of days’ detention

Scientists at the University of Westminster have calculated a scientific theory to work out how many days the government should detain a terror suspect without trial. According to Dr. Brown, the formula is D=T×(21/7)×1W, where D = number of days detention, W = number of days in a week and T = number of towers destroyed, and 21/7 is the date of the most recent attack on London.

The academics and mathematicians behind the study, commissioned by the Labour Party, say that the formula will be of use to anyone planning to detain criminals beyond the period normally allowed by law.

The scientists have stressed that the formula is only valid in Britain. Dr Blair was quick to point out that their research found that “in America, for example, imprisonment, or even torture, without trial should continue indefinitely”.

Human rights campaigners have welcomed the findings. A spokesperson for Liberty said “oh, well, if it’s maths then I guess it must be okay”.

42 Days: What do YOU think?

The 42-day detention without charge of terror suspects is a controversial measure, and it is hard to find anyone in government or the media whose opinion is not guided by an obvious vested interest. Therefore, in line with standard media practice, we have found two ordinary members of the public on opposite sides of the debate and given them both a chance to have their say here:

Mohammed Imami

I was arrested in Euston Station three months ago. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was released without charge after 26 days, but my employers had already replaced me. My marriage had been strained to breaking point and I hadn’t been able to pay my bills. My life has been a total nightmare ever since. I cannot see any justification for the new measures.

Moyra Haynes

Well, as a woman who was raped by a man released without charge from police custody 39 days earlier, I have to say I’m in favour of the measures. I only wish we’d had them sooner. It turned out that my attacker hadn’t actually committed the crime he’d been arrested for, but that’s the power of these new measures — they still would have protected me.

Official Chinese Olympic report mentions only events China won

Following the discovery that the fireworks seen around the world at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics were computer generated, and the replacement of a singer Yang Peiyi with a more photogenic mime, details have begun to emerge of other alterations the Chinese have made to the Olympic Games’ image.

The official website so far makes no mention of the swimming events in which Chinese athletes managed only bronze and silver medals, and bloggers in Beijing are reporting that they can’t find the stadium anywhere in the city, leading to speculation that a more attractive city, possibly in Korea, has been used as a stand-in.

One intrepid Olympic correspondent has noted that only one of the Chinese synchronised diving team is ever available for interviews, and that his dressing room contains a fifteen metre high mirror.

Judge decides Mosely basement romp “not wrong”

Josef Fritzl seeking to hire same lawyer.

Inflatable church blows away, converts four (This was the week that two unrelated inflatables were in the news. I just related them.)

An inflatable church designed for Italian beachgoers became detached from its moorings last week and blew into a town centre. Three men and a woman having lunch in a local cafe at the time were struck by the blow-up house of God and were instantly converted to Roman Catholicism.

One of the victims said, “I was having a coffee outside, when suddenly I felt something large and rubbery brush past the back of my head. I was filled with this amazing feeling of love, and I suddenly felt that somehow everything was going to be alright.”

Not all of the group were happy about the conversion, however. One was previously a non-practicing Christian, and did not notice her conversion for two days, when she saw the Pope on television and couldn’t shake the feeling that his word was infallible. Theologians diagnosed her with Catholicism the following day. Since then she has read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in its entirety twice, but failed to beat her condition. “It’s been dreadful,” said another. “I was quite happy as an agnostic, but since becoming a Catholic I’ve been racked with guilt and had difficulty reconciling much of my knowledge with my new faith.”

Also struck by the floating house of worship was Abu Mohammed Ahmed, then a devout Muslim. He is considering suing the operators of the inflatable church, claiming that since his conversion he has been shunned by his family for apostasy and finds it difficult fitting in to his new church. He has, however, found that he quite likes pork, previously forbidden to him since pigs are considered unclean in Islam.

Tesco Store Sign Changes Again

A drive by the Plain English Campaign (PEC) to change signs in Tesco stores has caused mass confusion. The offending signs originally read “10 items or less”, but the PEC complained that “less” should only be used to modify mass nouns. Their proposed alternative, “10 items or fewer”, was deemed ‘too stilted’ by the store’s managers and “no more than 10 items” sounded ‘too negative’. A new sign was eventually unveiled that read “up to 10 items”, but this soon came under fire from the public, who no longer knew if they were allowed exactly ten items.

Tesco rejected a proposal from the UK Mathematics Trust to solve this problem using signs that read “n items, where 0 < n < 10″, when a focus group admitted it had them entirely stumped. The phrasing “10 items or not as many items as that” was rejected also, as was “No more items than you have fingers” as it was feared that the latter might offend the disabled, and nobody was sure if thumbs counted anyway.

In an interview with the BBC, a spokesperson for the Plain English Campaign was asked if it was true that there had actually been less than 5 complaints about the original signs. “I’m sorry,” was the response, “but I don’t know what you mean,” and he kept up this ridiculous charade until the interviewer gave an audible sigh and asked if fewer than 5 people had complained. The spokesperson then admitted that actually nobody at all had complained.

The signs currently read “zero, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 items”, and so far nobody has complained except for the man who makes the signs and two shoppers in Cambridge who were offended by the use of the so-called ‘Oxford comma’. Tesco management have admitted they neither know nor care what that means.

It is thought that all of this has cost Tesco just fewer than £2 million.

Neither is fun to read. Quacks do love to go on, possibly because simply saying a lot of things is an effective way to stop sceptics from being able to counter them all — it takes a second to say ‘miasmas exist’ without a reference but it takes a good five minutes to properly explain why they don’t. Throw in a stock ‘reference’ and a response might take an hour to craft. Of course, you can just say ‘prove it’ but that won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already have a healthy respect for science. It also doesn’t help that the English is somewhat broken. Possibly it is a second language. (In the quote below I have refrained from adding ‘[sic]‘ after errors, as it would be appended to every other sentence and just look like Vithoulkas had been at the sherry.)

Apparently, Randi fell ill and the challenge had to be postponed, by which time a change of management meant the centre would not be willing to participate. I can sympathise with this — the research unit I work for has this kind of problem all the time. Almost exactly this has happened at least once. That’s one of the problems, unfortunately, with doing proper science: everything has to be planned so meticulously that the slightest detail can throw it out and cause long delays. Vithoulkas claims that this was a trick to avoid ever having the experiment:

In 7.4.2006 Mr. Gindis wrote to Mr. Randi in order to signal to him that the homeopathic team was ready to start… But instead Randi suspended all activities of the experiment attributing it to his supposedly state of health!

Mr. Randi knew very well that this period was crucial for us to start the experiment and we had made this urgency explicit by sending several e-mails urging them that it was necessary to go ahead immediately. But Mr. Randi needed …six months “to recover” denying to assign a collaborator.

James Randi is 80 years old. Is it really that hard to believe he might be ill?

Vithoulkas and his team refused to accept this change to the schedule and have decided to do the experiment without Randi, which Randi.org quite accurately described as a withdrawal from the challenge. Randi points out that as his foundation is the one offering a million dollar prize, he gets to set the terms. Vithoulkas has decided that this is unfair and then, brilliantly, written Randi a retraction for him to post. He hasn’t. It seems to me that as a homeopath Vithoulkas is unfamiliar with the problems faced by real scientists doing actual clinical trials and is presumably used to ploughing on in an ad-hoc fashion and knocking the whole ’study’ out in a week.  I can see how in that case Doing It Right might look like stalling.

Still, whoever is right, I presume that since homeopathy4health is now in the business of chastising sceptics who she feels are shirking from a challenge, she will be immediately getting six bottled remedies and negotiating with Andy Lewis to find a trusted third party so she can participate in his far easier, lower-stakes challenge.

Otherwise frankly she’s fooling nobody but herself (and that’s only because herself is so very credulous).

I can’t personally vouch for this teaching: I had much of it drummed into me when I started my PhD (because it’s important), but it’s clearly expressed and illustrated with a range of examples somewhere between lavish and obsessive. The examples also show how universal the methods are: the chapter on Homeopathy also explains about good experimental methods, overuse of antibiotics, superstition, detox programmes, acupuncture, and meta-analysis and its role in assessing the effectiveness of steroids. It’s a structure I like a lot: interestingly varied without seeming like a collection of unconnented anecdotes, and with a strong theme to each chapter and a sense of progression through the book.

The book features chapters themed around the ideas used by Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford, which discusses their own various publications. McKeith’s, he says,

have an air of ‘referenciness’, with nice little superscript numbers … but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it’s shocking how often they aren’t what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text

and of Holford’s,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

I heartily agree. I think that is, in part, why Goldacre’s book, as well as telling you things, shows you experiments and references you can use to check it all yourself (although the references are ferreted away in an appendix where they belong, rather than gaudily paraded in the body text, looking authoritative but basically just getting in the way). I think this is also because the book strongly agrues against the depiction of science as “didactic truth statements from… arbitrary, unelected authority figures”, and that would look pretty silly if presented with no evidence. (Although Goldacre makes a point of never claiming any authority: he doesn’t put “Dr” on the front cover — he doesn’t even have a capital ‘G’.) Transparency is the key to good science, a topic touched upon every time a quack mentioned in the book refuses to publish their research methods.

Holford’s book is also of interest, because Goldacre picks apart his reference list in great detail. Not out of malice or to make fun of him, but because as we know,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

Okay. Let’s do that.

Goldacre’s book has fourteen pages of notes and references (at least the first edition does). I selected one from each page at random, and checked that it said what he says it said: 2 I couldn’t read, 1 was a note only, the other 11 checked out ane way or another, so that’s basically a 100% hit rate. I didn’t critique the referenced articles, mostly because I don’t have the time or inclination, but none of the research says anything very controversial anyway. Anyone who has read chapter 12 will realise that I am biased here, but that’s why I’m being transparent so you can check up on me too if you like: I’ve put the list of references I looked up, and a brief verdict on each, after the fold.

The other main theme of the book is the problems with ‘dumbing-down’ (a depressingly autological phrase) of the world of science and health: miracle cures, medicalised syndromes for everything, reports of conclusions rather than evidence, and so on. I think this was my favourite passage on that theme:

Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely impenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it.

I’d love to hear what someone with no scientific training thought of this book. But I expect they would learn a lot about the nature of evidence and the mental traps that make it so, acquire a lot of useless trivia about the proponents of pseudoscientific bullshit, learn to spot future nonsense, and have a good laugh along the way. I rate that as worth the price — not least because if you pay attention then the book will pay for itself the first time you don’t buy a pack of useless pills.

Since we’re talking transparency, the author declares that he received his copy of Bad Science free from the publishers and that, not being what you’d call a professional critic, the novelty of this kind of thing hasn’t worn off even a bit.

The references I checked:

1. Schultz et al, p46: I can’t read the paper with my university login, but the abstract agrees with the book and even I recognise one of the author’s names — an impressive feat for a statistician.
2. Shang et al, (PDF) p56: This is a hugely well-known paper. It says what we all know it says. I especially like the funnel plots: like Goldacre’s book, they don’t make drug companies look all that great either.
3. Giona F, p70: This paper is still in press and I can’t find it. To be fair, the claim it supports is of sufficient irrelevance to be in brackets.
4. S Wolf, p78: This seems to support Goldacre’s precis (at least to the extent that I’m reading these, which is much less than I would were I doing real science here).
5. Buske-Kirschbaum et al, p80: This is a great paper, and one which doesn’t seem to have been misrepresented.
6. H Frankfurt, p89: This is a book which I have not read, but is quoted in the main body, so you can judge it for yourself.
7. Moynihan et al (open-access), p153: This is provided more as further reading: the title is enough to justify the ‘claim’, such as it is.
8. p164: This is a note and not a reference.
9. S Mayor, p183: This doesn’t require much reading to check. Yes.
10. Curfman, et al, p202: Again, pretty unequivocal. Yes.
11. Nathan et al, p203: This is also an unequivocal yes.
12. Manning et al, p262: This article describes what the book says it describes, albeit briefly.
13. B Deer, p280: I couldn’t find the relevant information on this page. I would have referenced this page on the same site instead.
14. Grilli et al, p307: This (guardedly — this is Cochrane) supports the claim.

(This post is mostly quotes, for which I make no apology because the easiest way to mock this kind of nut-job is simply to hand him sufficient rope.)

The ‘Kadir-Buxton Method’ is a treatment for mental-health problems which he invented “decades ago”:

The procedure stuns and resets the brain of the patient, so that the patient returns to a normal condition. The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient atexactly the same time–

Do not do this. It is very dangerous.

–and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand. The arrow in Figure 1 shows this point for your ease of use.

…

At this point I would like to explain the difference between a stun and a punch. With the Kadir-Buxton Method, a patient standing on one leg whilst holding a rose would still be standing on one leg and holding a rose when they were cured. With a punch, the patient would be lying prone on the floor, and could well have dropped the rose. And just to add insult to injury, they would still be mentally ill. Try it for yourselves if you do not believe me.

Oh, yes, this guy’s proper crazy. Because you see, he doesn’t just cure mental health issues…

My method of unblocking fallopian tubes should be taken up by the NHS. It would increase the success rate of fertility treatment drastically, and also cut down on more expensive treatments.

He’s keen on NHS adoption. He’s even petitioning the Prime Minister to ear-box mental patients.

Many years ago I came up with the idea of feeding breast milk to old people who had suffered from immune system collapse. I got the idea when I found an obscure reference to Ayurvedic practitioners… My method was successful, the most famous person who was treated for it was the Queen Mother, then in her seventies, who went on to live for another twenty years or so.

Having cured mental illness, infertility and old age, all these people will need clean electricity:

Thus a 50% cut in Carbon emissions is achievable with the use of Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators.

That’s not totally crazy, but this is:

The Kadir-Buxton Jump Start (formerly Buxton Jump Start) … is so called because when it is used on a [dead] patient the [now living] patient immediately sits up with a start.

After that it starts to get really strange:

Primary Menstrual Cramps can be a debilitating problem for some 10% of women. … Orgasm from masturbation has been found to relieve the painful symptoms of menstrual cramps. … In order to do this one simply has to clench and then relax the vagina repeatedly for five minutes. With this method no one need know of the discomfort being suffered, and the pain soon goes. … Do not try this whilst driving or operating heavy machinery.

No shit?

I had been instructing women in the Hands Free method of controlling Primary Menstrual Cramps since I was a school boy.

…Is that allowed?

The Buxton Handclap Method of delivering babies that minimises birth trauma to both mother and baby is used in various Third World countries, and according to one statistic quoted in ‘New Scientist’ would lead to an improvement in IQ of 15 points over natural child birth, and thus minimise intellectual impairment caused by difficult child birth.

Of course, if you don’t want to have children at all, he can help with that, too:

In the 1980s I fended off an unprovoked attack. … I gave the [now unconscious] person a bruising slap round the buttocks. When the attacker came to it was said that the experience was even better than sex. I knew at once I was on to another invention. Whilst paralysed… the sensation of pain is replaced by super enhanced pleasure. As Governments around the world have been looking for a safe alternative to sex this appears to be it.

Specifically, David Blunkett is looking for that. Although he does say “it is not an alternative to contraception as the sexual act is also far more fun”. I’m inclined to agree.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that he reads the Daily Express, on whose website he makes up yet more stuff he’s never defined:

The best way to redistribute wealth is to end mental illness. This would free up £100 billion a year in the UK alone. The Kadir-Buxton Method cures the mentally ill in just thirty seconds and a local practice nurse can do it. 

We then use the five Buxton Coefficients of Unemployment at a local level to create jobs for them, and suddenly we have ridden out the economic crisis and can look forward to another four years of Gordon Brown. Go for it Gordon.

I’m sure that you, like me, want to know how one man can achieve such pre-eminence in so many diverse fields. Well, Andy Kadir-Buxton is willing to share his amazing secret:

IQ can be increased slightly by the educational system. It is only slight because most education revolves around memorising facts, which increases eidetic memory rather than leaning logic which increases IQ. … An IQ of over 150 brings with it the bonus of being able to invent which can be economially useful.

I always tell people that the best way of learning logic is to study and analyse the character Mr Spock in ‘Star Trek.’

So now you know. All those hours of watching Star Trek were increasing your IQ all along. Who knew?

[BPSDB]

Today’s g2 contains a dull and ill-thought-out article about whether or not animals feel grief, by Justine Hankins, who used to be the Guardian’s “pets editor”. It’s perhaps to be expected, then, that she is eager to think animals have human feelings. It’s nice to see her questioning the rest of the media for taking this too far, but personally, I’m not sure she’s quite got the hang of it yet…

Photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla in Munster Zoo, holding the lifeless body of her three-month-old infant… have prompted headlines such as “Heartbreaking” and “A Mother’s Grief”. … Are we too quick to project human feelings onto animals, particularly our closest ape relatives?

…René Descartes believed that… animals are no more capable of higher emotion than a clock. But, as anyone who has been watching Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series The Genius of Darwin will recall, evolution favours any species with strong enough parental instincts to see their young through infancy. Animals invest time, energy and genetic material into their young, just as we do, and they naturally want them to survive.—

Let’s be careful with the word “want”. Once you say “want” you’re kind of begging the question: anything that “wants” has emotions. I think you’re being too quick to project human feelings onto our closest ape relatives again. If you start bandying words like “want” about then before you know it you’re going to say something like

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that they would also feel loss when their young die?

Yes.

Evolution probably doesn’t care too much what happens to mothers of dead infants. Evolving to stop caring for dead children is probably low down the genetic priority list, several items beneath keeping the children alive in the first place. There’s no reason to imagine that the gorilla’s behaviour is the result of grief. It could just as easily be well-meaning genes misfiring. Grief is totally unnecessary to explain any part of gorilla behaviour that I’m aware of.

Of course, they might. I don’t know. Hankins’ argument has utterly failed to convince me, but I really have no idea how gorillas work. I’ve not, say, been observing wild baboons in Namibia for years, but that’s probably why there’s a quote from a man who has, and he’s “reluctant to describe this as grief in the human sense”. That’s that settled, then, presumably…

Gana has a history of neglecting her young, and the infant’s death may have been a result of her poor parenting. So perhaps it’s not so much grief as guilt she’s exhibiting. Or maybe that’s an anthropomorphic step too far.

Yes it damn well is! Why must you persist in this? You’ve started by trying to explore quite a complex question in a 300-word column, and ended up saying nothing except “maybe”, and posing another, almost identical question. What possible use is that?

The article frustrated me mostly because it was 300 words of nothing, beyond raising a question that could have been just as easily posed in fifteen. The opening paragraph made it sound interesting, but there was no worthwhile discussion around the theme at all — a fact made even more annoying since she’d clearly interviewed someone who could have provided some. Hankins started out by observing that journalists liked to ascribe human feelings to animals and spent the whole column indulging in exactly the same wooly thinking.

Might as well have let Gana write the column for all the content we’d have missed out on.

I would love to look indepth at the media’s odd relationship with animals - but you get 300 words and a couple of hours and that’s it. I know it’s not perfect but it’s how the media works. I personally was quite shocked at how some of the media had protrayed this incident as if it was exactly the same as the feelings a human mother would have. I have a deep respect and affection for animals, but in general, this sort of sentimentality is not good for our understanding of animals and doesn’t apparently make us treat them any better.

With which I agree — she’s quite right to highlight the absurdity. My problem was that she also seemed to be indulging in it in the same column.

By ending the piece with the gorilla’s bad parenting record - I was trying to deflate the ‘heartbroken mother’ angle - sorry if it didn’t come off. If I ever get the chance, I’ll finish off the opening in a more challenging way!

After reading all of the above, I feel a bit bad and think that maybe the bit about evolution was misjudged, and came across (to me, anyway) as a genuine argument thrown in for balance, and that made the last paragraph read more like squirming than parody, a narrative trying to reach a conclusion that its own evidence won’t support.

At this point there’s not much I can do but sit here criticising the composition of the thing, which is well outside my comfort zone (besides which I’ve probably now written more words about this column than it contained, which is verging on tragic), so I think I shan’t bother. Anyone who’s used the internet for more than about an hour knows that it can be very difficult to detect irony in text — it says a lot for writers that most of the time readers understand them properly. In this case, whether my fault or hers, I didn’t read it as it was intended to read; let’s leave it at that.