And Slaters Go Plop

I’ve just purchased three new books and flipped open one of them, Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I’m greeted with the following introduction:

One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to go to work at his film production company in Amsterdam. He took out his old black bicycle and headed down a main road. Waiting in a doorway was a Moroccan man with a handgun and two butcher knives.

As Theo cycled down the Linnaeusstratt, Muhammad Bouyeri approached. He pulled out his gun and shot Theo several times. Theo fell off his bike and lurched across the road, then collapsed. Bouyeri followed. Theo begged, “Can’t we talk about this?” but Bouyeri shot him four more times. Then he took out one of his butcher knives and sawed into Theo’s throat. With the other knife, he stabbed a five-page letter onto Theo’s chest.

The letter was addressed to me.

I can see that this book is going to be very hard to put down.

I have a theory based on a number of observations and I want to give it a name. My observations are that there are things that lifeforms do to their environments that leave traces that wouldn’t otherwise naturally occur. I propose that we might be able to detect similar effects on other planets and deduce that there are lifeforms at work and that we might, if we are careful and/or very lucky, find evidence of previously unknown lifeforms here on our planet.

I’ve come up with a name for this theory. I’m calling it Intelligent Design.

We can define what ID is and what it isn’t. We can come up with ways we can test hypotheses. If we find evidence that points towards (or away from) an example of intelligent design we can publish papers in reputable scientific journals. When we find gaps in scientific knowledge in other areas we won’t even think about using this as an argument for Intelligent Design – we’ll have to come up with evidence that points toward our theories and not just away from others.

Unfortunately there are some people who are currently misusing the label of Intelligent Design and they will have to go back to using the old term for their beliefs: creationism. If they have some useful contributions to make they’re more than welcome to join in as they are for any of the other sciences but, just like in the other sciences, they are going to have to leave their non-science behind at the door.

Right, now that that’s dealt with. Onwards and upwards!

[edit: Over at NeuroLogicia, Dr Steven Novella clearly hasn't been informed of the recent changes I've made to the term 'Intelligent Design' but he provides a fairly lucid account of why the proponents of the old term weren't being particularly scientific in their approach that's well worth a read.]

Goodbye and thank you.

Here’s a message from him from last December after his 90th birthday:

The CSS property ‘max-width’ and ‘max-height’ doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6. Here’s a workaround:

.myclass {
width:expression(this.width > 100 ? (this.height > this.width ? (this.width / this.height) * 100 : 100) : true);
}

What does this do? It executes a bit of javascript within the CSS that goes along the lines of “If the width is greater than 100 pixels then set the width to 100 – unless the height is greater than the width, in which case scale it down to the difference between the width and the height – otherwise just leave it as it is”.

This means that any element that is of .myclass will fit proportionately into a 100×100 area (change the 100 for whatever max-width or max-height you require).

I hope this saves someone from having to figure this out in the future.

Ever since I was young my mind reeled when I tried to comprehend the vastness of our universe and all that is in it. I’ve since realised that it is impossible to truly comprehend these things and that this is a limitation of the bodies and minds we find ourselves in.

However if you, like me, are fascinated by the night sky and you want to get a better understanding of “not only what we know but how we know what we know” then you won’t find a better podcast than the Astronomy Cast.

If I were an alien I’d give it three thumbs up. Check it out.

My favourite TV presenter of all time is Sir David Attenborough – I own almost all of his documentaries on DVD.

He’s just released Life in Cold Blood (a series on reptiles) which he says will be his final ‘on-site’ documentary. Understandable really; he has been doing this most of his life and, at 81, gallivanting around the Amazon or the Sahara is no small thing.

I’m looking forward to purchasing his final ‘Life’ series and, David, if you ever get to read this I want you to know that the work you’ve been involved in has extended my world’s horizons more than any other person. And for that I’m eternally grateful.

Here’s what Nancy Bank-Smith (a TV critic) has to say about his career:

David Attenborough was chasing a giant anteater on the South American savannah. It jinked and sprinted, showing, for a hefty beast, a nifty turn of speed. He followed like a schoolboy in shorts, helpless with laughter. It was the blissful spring of television. Zoo Quest was the first programme to show wild animals in the wild and the oxygenating joy of that moment I shall always remember. I remembered it when I saw, with a sympathetic twinge, how stiffly he walked at 81 in Life in Cold Blood. We are stiffer and wiser than we were. Today he would sit down beside a giant anteater and ask, in that mimicable murmur, how it was feeling. And it would reply: “Endangered.”

And here’s a snippet of what a British TV audience voted as the number 1 moment:

I’ve been bellyaching for years now about how silly it is that there is no way to cycle from Auckland’s North Shore to the city centre. I discovered getacross.org.nz yesterday and encourage everyone to take a moment to visit and register your support for the idea.

The bicycle is the most energy-efficient machine ever made. You give it a drop of oil each month and all you have to do is eat some food to power it. Bicycles take up far less room on the road and can travel almost half as fast as a car on the open road and it often faster than cars in city traffic. Cycling is also far better for your health than sitting in a car.

The next time you are able to observe a traffic queue at lights try to imagine all the cars gone and the occupants standing on the road exactly where they are. You’ll see that cars are a cumbersome and grossly inefficient way of getting around within a city.

The downside of riding a bicycle in a city built for cars is that you act like a human pollution filter (especially if you are puffing a bit) and it is horrendously easy to get yourself killed.

I’d like to see our cities redesigned to favour walkers and cyclists and have car traffic relegated to motorways and as second-rate citizens within cities themselves. Cars are still useful and are probably here to stay but we need to recognise that there are better ways of getting around our cities and that one of the things holding this back is the fact that our infrastructure is often designed exclusively for motor vehicles without regard to walkers or cyclists.

Like me, you probably wonder from time to time whether you can eat the moon.

I have some bad news; you can’t, even with your friends helping you. Let’s do the figures:

The moon is bigger than it looks (this is because it’s far away) and it weighs in at about 73,477,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. Contrary to popular opinion it’s made of rock, not cheese (and a half moon is not, in fact, half the size). The fact that it is made of rock is a spanner in the works because it considerably reduces the amount a person can eat in a day. If you want to eat it you are going to have to powder the rock first and then eat it along with other food.

Still, this is a fairly simple equation and we have all the numbers: the weight of the moon divided by the amount you can eat per day gives you how many days it will take to eat the moon.

So, let’s assume that you can eat two powdered tablespoons per meal and we’ll assume that two tablespoons of powdered rock weighs a tidy 50 grams. That leaves us with the weight of the moon divided by 0.150 kg which tells us that it’ll take a person 1,342,045,662,100,456,621,004 years to eat the moon.

If you were to enlist the rest of the world to help you in this enterprise you would be looking at reducing this figure down to a mere 203,271,750,023 years. The age of the universe is 13,700,000,000 years which means you and the rest of the world would be required to exist for 15 times longer than the entire universe has done to date. And to make things worse you’ll probably spend a considerable percentage of this time on the toilet.

(There’s no way to wrap this up in a dignified manner so I’ll just say that perhaps, one day, someone will enter the search string “can you eat the moon?” into Google and I’ll have a little chortle to myself when I see that particular stat in my logs.)

Do we have it?

If yes:
- when do we get it?
- do other creatures have it?
- could we make a machine to have it?

If no:
- why not?
- how would you demonstrate that we don’t?