My May 2026 round up

Well, May has gone by fast and finished as a very hot one, setting new temperature records. I was hotter in Cardiff than in Kefalonia the week before!

Cooler in Kefalonia 

I have blogged multiple times about the two big events in May: the Senedd election and my Three Seas Cruise. You can catch up here:

Election

• Senedd Election post
• Celebrating the election win (and seeing my friend Sara get sworn in as member of the Senedd)
• Plus, if you're nerdy, my updated election leaflets graph

Cruise

• Dubrovnik to Malta
• Sicily and Kefalonia
• Corfu and Kotor
• The Red Museum in Dubrovnik

I also had a cinema trip to see The Mandalorian and Grogu with Cathy, and posted a Japanese novel as my Book of the Month.

I had a fun return to work after the cruise. On my first day back I drove to the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford to learn about how the team there are using a natural protein that dampens inflammation to protect insulin-producing cells, which could potentially open a door for a cure for type 1 diabetes. 

It's very early days in the science, with loads more work to do. I put on a white coat to lend a hand.

Towards the end of the month the time had also come round for another diabetes check up. My blood test was booked for the week after the cruise.  I will find out in June how much high seas living has affected me.

(Funny note - when I checked in for my blood test the screen told me I was booked in with "Mrs Phlebotamist", which is a very odd case of nominative determinism!)

I was unable to attend the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick this month as I was away that weekend. But the local church, St Dyfrig's and St Sansom's invited KGT volunteers along for a special environment-focused service on 31st May. I heard Fr Richard talk about the history of the church at Grangetown Historical Society last month and it piqued my interest.

The service was high church anglo-Catholic with lots of incense and some of the liturgy was sung. Fiona from KGT did one of the Scripture readings. It was also Trinity Sunday and Fr Richard admitted he was going to dodge the question of explaining how the Trinity works in his sermon. Sensible move there. 

After the service we were invited to proceed outside for an additional prayer for the environment by the statue of St Francis of Assisi. It felt like a post-credits scene in a movie.

Later, Cathy and I took advantage of the good weather to visit The Meadows Wildlife Park. Back in November we went there for Cathy's birthday and met Roly the armadillo. It was nice to go back when it wasn't so cold. 

We didn't see Roly, but I got to pat some friendly pigs and goats.

And I met a fabulous chicken!

Sports-wise it was a football-free month. I did get some free football stickers, despite my personal World Cup boycott. I drew my monthly Blood Bowl game with Bryan. And I played some rounds of mini-golf on the cruise ship. 

I can't promise these will be the last photos from the cruise I post on my blog, but they are the last ones in this blog post!

Book of the Month - Orbital (Booker Prize winner!)

I bought Orbital by Samantha Harvey in Wolverhampton on our wedding anniversary back in September. It was marked as being on the Booker long list when I bought it. Shortly after I started reading it, it won!

I was attracted to the book by the premise - a team of astronauts completing a 24 hour cycle on board, orbiting the planet 16 times during that period. It felt like sciencey fiction rather than science-fiction, and it was intriguing. 

It has the added bonus of being a short book, but that didn't make it a fast or easy read. There is a deliberateness to the prose - I get the sense this is one of those books where the author lingered over every sentence and rewrote every paragraph. It certainly feels over-written. I've seen it described as 'would have been better as a poem' and there is a descriptive poetic quality to the language.

However, there are benefits in the way the prose mirrors the exacting over-engineered nature of the space station. Firstly, it slowed me down as a reader, forcing me into ponderous progress not unlike the astronauts struggling to keep artificial time in a scenario where time is essentially meaningless - it will be sunset or sunrise soon, they will see both in the next hour or so and then again in the hour after that. 

The second unexpected benefit is a sense of cool detachment. The astronauts are both inhabitants of Earth and not, so their perspective is suddenly wider in its compass, seeing the planet as a whole. 

However, this slowed down detachment gets tedious very quickly. To add to the dreamlike narrative, there is no direct speech. Conversations are reported on the same way as characters internal thoughts, the same way as flashbacks to Earth, the same way as the characters past experiences. The sentences are full of descriptors. Consider this passage and you will see what I mean:

"Blue becomes mauve becomes indigo becomes black, and night-time downs southern Africa in one. Gone is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel-overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth. Gone is a continent and here another sheer widow's veil of star-struck night." (p.91)

Exhausting, isn't it. 

Back when I was in school we had an English lesson discussing the difference between metaphors and similes. I count six (maybe seven) metaphors and one simile in that short section. And that's not even a complete paragraph. 

It's lovely, beautiful, evocative language that effectively replicates the grandeur of seeing a continent slip below your window as you sail past in low earth orbit. But, my goodness, it's draining to read. 

And the spaceship makes a complete orbit of the Earth every 90 minutes. Each chapter of the book is an orbit. There are regular updates of which parts of the planet the space station is travelling over. I like geography but even I grew tired of reading lists of countries, continents and seas. 

Amid all the metaphors there are the stories of the individuals in the team of astronauts. Two main stories dominate the book - one personal, the death of a parent; the other a personal connection to a disastrous typhoon that the astronauts observe building up into a colossal fury unleashed on part of the world that isn't built to withstand typhoons. 

As they go about their various jobs and tasks, ranging from examining the effects of life in space on mice through to taking their own blood samples to examine the effects of space on them, we learn about each character's drive to get into space. We discover their inspiration, their similar personalities that carried them through astronaut and cosmonaut programmes. They have wildly different origin stories but their common humanity shines through.

The base shared humanness of the crew is the central underlying theme of the book - that actually we are all astronauts, travelling through the hostile barrenness of space on an amazing spaceship that happens to be a planet called Earth. The theme that we should be taking better care of this precious home of ours permeates the book, with a hard contrast to the cold vast emptiness of space. (I did smile at the description of the Voyager probes "wimbling into wayless dark".)

There is an urgency to that message that contrasts cleverly with the pace of the story. The detached astronauts orbiting overhead can see that we are one world, that frontiers are stupid, useless, arbitrary things that can't be seen from space. But can those of us locked to land see it too? And see it in time to avert disaster? That's the question that Orbital is really asking.

Book of the Month: Existential Physics

The tagline 'A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions' grabbed my attention and made me buy this book by Sabine Hossenfelder, whose day job is studying quantum gravity at Frankfurt University.

The questions covered in Existential Physics are a mix of hard science (How did the universe begin? Are humans just bags of atoms or something more?) and speculation (Is the universe conscious? Do copies of us exist in a multiverse?) with some extra stuff that is a bit of both - hard speculation, if you will. 

Along the way, there are some very interesting summaries of what we can say for certain, and some ideas that scientists advocate for that are, at best, ascientific, meaning there is just no way, now, to know. 

The chapter on death and dying and how, on a human level, it illustrates entropy provided a me with a new take on the subject. Although there is no evidence for an "afterlife", and no workable scientific theory for one, the impression individuals make on the universe as "information" is never truly lost - unless it ends up in a black hole. Versions of us sort of might continue to exist, which is weirdly comforting.

I got a bit lost in the discussion about free will and determinism, which cropped up in a couple of places. I can accept that our universe is almost entirely predictable, if an observer had access to enough data and in that sense 'free will' as understood by most people doesn't actually exist. It's not a very intuitive way to approach things though - and Sabine acknowledges this and addresses the issue of holding people to account for their actions, whether those actions are pre-determined or not. There are a few similar diversions from physics into ethics throughout the book.

There is a small section of one of the later chapters that is probably the best precis I have ever read about artificial intelligence at this stage in the development of AI (pp207-210). Sabine outlines what is currently known about trying to create thinking machines and presents a convincing case that the first true AIs will be fragile and will struggle to survive.

"...artificial intelligences at first will be few and one of a kind, and that's how it will remain for a long time. It will take large groups of people and many years to build and train artificial general intelligences. Copying them will not be any easier than copying a human brain. They'll be difficult to fix when broken, because, as with the human brain, we won't beable to separate the hardware from the software. The early ones will die quickly for reasons we will not even comprehend."

That actually made me feel sad for the creations we might bring into being. Sabine also points out that these AIs will most likely be owned by people who are already rich and powerful and will reflect the ethics and interests of their masters. It's a very good point that I've not seen mentioned in other discussions of AI.

Another superb section is the interview with Zeeya Merali, which discusses whether it would be possible to bring another universe into existence. It's certainly doable in theory if beyond human current engineering ability in practice. But if a universe was created then it would separate off almost immediately, and develop detached from our universe. It could expand infinitely and sentient beings could evolve there and we would almost certainly never know, unless we discovered a way to observe other universes (which we can't do now, making the concept of a multiverse ascientific even though lots of scientists talk about it as established fact). 

This leads to a discussion of ethics and morality - what responsibility would the creator(s) of that universe have towards any beings that lived in it? That's an ethical conundrum in its own right. It also opens up the possibility that if it's theoretically possible that we could create universes, then this universe may also have been created in a similar fashion. Not that there is any need for a creator based on what we observe about our universe, but a universe created in a lab would probably look the same as ours from inside. 

Consciousness is a topic that crops up throughout the book. Trying to explain why humans have consciousness is really difficult - it's something that seems to be more than the sum of our parts (our constituent atoms) and if I understood what Sabine was saying, the observations of consciousness in complex combinations of atoms isn't something that could be predicted by just looking at those individual atoms. So, something currently unexplainable is going on. 

The final section of the book is about whether there is any purpose to everything. Sabine concludes that the desire to understand the universe is a meaningful purpose in itself, and I found that a satisfying way to end the book. 

I have read several 'popular science' books over the last few years. I found this harder than any I've read previously. The scientific terms come at the reader quickly and there were several occasions when I needed to re-read paragraphs. Some of the early chapters were particularly hardgoing, but I'm glad I powered through - either I got smarter as the book went on (unlikely) or the concepts were less bound up in mathematical theory so were easier to convey in words that a reader like me could grasp. 

As a plus point, though, Sabine includes a 'Brief Answer' at the end of every chapter which summarises all that has been said before into three or four sentences. I found that very helpful clarifying what I had just read. 

Nostalgia Triggers from 90s Choons

I usually listen to the radio when I'm doing stuff in the kitchen. With the world generally being pretty dreadful I've been avoiding news-based stations and so have retuned the radio to Absolute Radio 90s, which just plays songs from the 1990s, triggering memories from two thirds of my life ago.

Photo taken in Paris in 1993 or 1994

For example, when The Size of a Cow by The Wonderstuff comes on, then I'm transported back to sitting at the heavy lab desk at the back of Mr Dorricott's science classroom. My desk-mate, Tim, was really into The Wonderstuff and a lot of other music. He used to go on the train to Birmingham to buy "choons". He pirated me a cassette of Nevermind. I remember once at my house my tape player chewed up his tape of Achtung! Baby and when we cut and pasted the tape back together we put one bit back in the wrong way round. Unintentional remixes of our time.

(This will all mean nothing to anyone under the age of 30, probably. Tapes? What are those?)

Another song that is on heavy rotation on AR90s is Parklife by Blur. I have a very specific memory related to this. Back when that song came out I used to go to a church that met in an upper complex of rooms above a pub. During Sunday evening meetings you could hear the music playing in the pub downstairs. Sunday evening meetings were generally informal, and I remember one evening we had moved the chairs round into small circles to pray in groups. Through the floor came the thudding beats of Parklife. I wasn't the only one in the prayer circle mentally singing along.

All the people
So many people
And they all go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
(beat)
Parklife

I know I wasn't the only one singing along because a few of us mouthed the word 'Parklife' in time with the song. We saw each other do it and grinned.

And then I left Shrewsbury to go to university, just as the Britpop bubble exploded. Anything by Oasis or Shed 7 or Elastica reminds me of university days. Basket Case makes me think of my digs in the first year when one of the first things I bought was a CD player that I cobbled into my hi-fi amp and double tapedeck. But those are later days and moving to Cardiff for Uni, to living here afterwards is more of a continuum. When I left Shrewsbury to go to university I ended up never going back there to live, not even for a summer holiday. So that is the one clear page break in my story.

It's the songs from the early 90s that are the real nostalgia triggers, but that's not to say I particularly want to wallow in that nostalgia. Looking back it's a wonder I got through those teenage years as I was barely coping with undiagnosed depression, was a fervent religious fundamentalist, and had the weight of expectations on me to go to university and achieve great things.

That last one is hard to reconcile with the great love I had (and still have) for my father, but he did tell me how he thought I could follow in his footsteps and study medicine, and one reason I went to study theology is because I knew Dad would approve of that choice when medicine was closed off to me (more on that later).

Understanding depression more as an adult, I can see how it affected me quite a bit as a teenager. I know I'm not unique in finding teenage life hard. Recently I have reconnected with a few people I knew in school and realised that I wasn't the only one who was presenting a brave face. Some of the people I most admired have told me they felt constantly on edge, or were hiding an eating disorder, or were bullied as badly as I sometimes was, if not worse.

I think it would have been good for my fragile, nervous self when I was younger, if I had known that the people who seemed to have got their stuff together were actually feeling just as desperate on the inside.

For me, my depression has left me with some regrets. I dropped friendships that I wish I hadn't. It affected my concentration and my ability to focus on schoolwork, and dampened down my love of learning. I barely read some of my textbooks at A-Level. It's stuff I sometimes wish I had actually learned. It also stopped me from learning new skills. I was very keen to learn how to play guitar, went through a depressive phase, sold the guitar to a classmate, and I still occasionally wish that I had been in a mental place where I could have actually learned to play it.

I had almost zero self-confidence, which was also linked to the depression. Here's a story that illustrates it. I was planning on studying science at A-Level, with the end aim of applying for medical school. I went on an open day to the VI Form College and went to the science labs. My school had switched that year from single subject science GCSEs to a "Double Science" course that covered all three subjects and gave you two GCSE grades at the end.

When the science teacher heard this, he was very dismissive. "Oh," he said, "you won't be able to do A-Levels unless you've done single subjects at GCSE. Most people find the step up really hard anyway, so it will be almost impossible for you!"

I remember feeling absolutely shocked by that. There was no point trying if it was going to be impossible. So I went and did three other subjects instead.

For a long time I was angry that my school had made me do double science, because that had prevented me from going on and potentially becoming a doctor like my dad. But it wasn't the school, and it wasn't even that discouraging response from the A-Level teacher who was to blame.

It was only recently I thought to myself, 'Why did I let someone I had never met before shape my choices in such a way?' Without sounding disrespectful, he was just a bog-standard teacher in a run of the mill VI Form College in a half-horse town. In what way was he an authority? He had never met me and he had no clue whether I was any good at science or not.

That encounter could have gone another way. I could have ignored him and had a go. I got Double As in my Double Science (despite mainly talking to Tim about music) so clearly I had some ability.

Besides, every A-Level teacher reckons their subject is really hard and requires a lot of work. If I turned up in that class and I was behind the curve, then a good teacher would find a way to bring me up to speed, rather than writing off my chances before I'd started the course.

But when you're depressed and you feel that everything is a struggle, you don't respond to negativity like that in a positive way. It doesn't spur you on to try hard and prove them wrong, which is how I wish I had responded.

You have to be careful with wishes like that though. If I hadn't been so discouraged by that guy, I wouldn't have ended up studying theology. Even, if I hadn't been depressed and had studied and got the A-level grades I wanted to get, I wouldn't have ended up studying theology in Cardiff. My life would have had a very different trajectory and although I was in a pretty tough place then, I'm in a good place now. Happier than a lot of people, and, I hope, doing a bit of good in the world.

It all worked out. It could have been an easier route, though.

I'm going to stick with listening to Absolute Radio 90s because in a strange way hearing those songs has helped me rearrange some mental furniture and appreciate my journey from then to now.

My 2016 book reviews list

This is my last review for 2016. Last year I split the books I'd read in 2015 across three posts. I've decided not to do that this time around, even though this will end up as a long post! I have split it into fiction (with comic books and children's fiction separate) and non-fiction. Just scroll down for non-fiction if you have no interest in fiction. I've also listed them in the order I finished them.

Fiction books 

Burmese Days - George Orwell ~ based on his real-life experiences growing up in Burma during British imperial occupation, this is ahead of its time in showing the brutal racism that underpinned British attitudes to the subject races of the Empire. It also included this funny extract about the Bible.

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ~ exceedingly long Russian classic that took me a couple of years to finish. My reading of it was not helped by how deeply unsympathetic Anna Karenina is as a character. You can read a full review of just how much I disliked this book here.

Player One - Douglas Coupland ~ four strangers are trapped in an airport bar as the world comes to an abrupt, apocalyptic end. I noticed several ideas were recycled from other Coupland books, sometimes verbatim. Then I discovered this novel was actually his contribution to a famous lecture series so I can't really blame him for cutting a few corners. Still, not his best work. The most interesting character in this is a girl with autism who breeds laboratory mice for a living and her interaction with the world and self-awareness about how she interacts differently is well captured.

Generation A - Douglas Coupland ~ after bees go 'extinct', five random strangers across the world are stung and become the centre of government attempts to solve the riddle of the bees. The five are detained under the watchful eye of a crazy scientist who believes the link is in the power of story-telling. It's a bit of a weird one, even by Coupland's standards but reasonably enjoyable.

The Gates - John Connolly ~ this is a young adult novel about Samuel, a young teenage boy who discovers his neighbours are messing around with the occult and have accidentally opened "the gates" that allow demons through from hell into the real world. Of course no adults believe Samuel so it is up to him and his mates to save the world. Some of the demonic carnage is surprisingly gruesome.

Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey ~ fantasy story about a world where dragons are used to combat interplanetary spores that will destroy all life. It had a plot device that I worked out long before the characters did. There's an awful lot of conversations about events rather than describing the action, which makes it feel dated. It's also clear that other authors (like Naomi Novik) owe a huge debt to the ideas in this book.

The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks ~ the second Culture novel, centering on a representative of the Culture being commissioned to visit the Empire of Azad and play the famous Game of Azad that determines who will become Emperor. I had read this before 13 years ago and was surprised how many key scenes in the story I remembered, I felt I got more out of it on the second reading and it was interesting to see how advanced Banks' ideas about the Culture were so early on in the series.

Fangland - John Marks ~ creepy horror that borrows heavily from Dracula and other vampire lore. Evangeline Harker works for a TV news channel and travels to Transylvania to interview a crime lord who turns out to be a darker monster that feeds off the memories of murder victims. The monster wants to travel to New York because it's attracted to the energy unleashed from the ruins of the World Trade Centre (this was published in 2007 not long after 9/11). I don't usually read horror and was misled slightly by the quirky cover that promised more humour in the story.

Complicity - Iain Banks ~ a newspaper columnist is framed for a series of grisly murders, and it looks bad for him because all the victims are people he had named in one of his columns as people who deserved to have some street justice meted out to them. He has to find the real killer before the police decide the circumstantial evidence is too great to ignore. There's a lot of sex and bloody violence in the story, both of which stray into being uncomfortably graphic.

The Girl with all the Gifts ~ M.R. Carey - science fiction post-apocalyptic zombie story that I think was probably my book of the year. Melanie is a child held in a secure education institution who begins to realise she is not a normal girl like the ones she reads about in books. The world outside is not as the books say as well, with the human population under threat from zombie cannibals, known as 'hungries'. When hungries overwhelm the institution, Melanie and some human protectors try to reach Beacon, the last outpost of humanity. But first they have to cross a hungry-infested London. The cause of the 'hungry' outbreak is based on a process found in nature. The book itself is gripping, I kept finding myself wanting to pick it up at breakfast to find out what happened next, and it was difficult to put it down. The characters are all very believable, despite the questionable premise.

When They Come from Space - Mark Clifton ~ 1960s science fiction that is more of a pastiche of political bureaucracy. Ralph Kennedy, a psychologist, is drafted by mistake into the space navy just before aliens make contact with humans. There was some humour and the lampooning of media barons was entertaining, but the story wasn't particularly thrilling.

Children's fiction

The Wombles to the Rescue - Elisabeth Beresford ~ the Wombles need to meet their fellow Wombles from around the world to deal with the great oil crisis (this was written in the 70s). While Great Uncle Bulgaria heads to the International Womble Conference in the USA, Tobermory solves the problem with a synthetic replacement, showing the Wombles were light years ahead of human green tech solutions. The story is oddly paced and there are no scenes at the conference or in America, which seems like a missed opportunity to widen the world of the Wombles a bit and show us what American ones are like.

Noggin the King - Oliver Postgate & Peter Firmin ~ short story book about Noggin the Nog (70s kids TV character). As king, Noggin feels a responsibility to care for his people, but he doesn't know if he is also king of the birds and whether he should be caring for them, so he goes with Queen Nooka into the forest to find out. The story really comes second to the lovely illustrations.

Comic books (or graphic novels)

Halo & Sprockett: Welcome to Humanity - Kerry Callan ~ entertaining collection of comic strips about an angel (Halo) and a robot (Sprockett) who are living with a young woman called Katie, and are trying to understand human beings. There's a lot of heart to the book and I found it very amusing.

Serenity: Better Days ~ the Serenity crew (from the TV series Firefly) come into money in a heist but then lose it again, possibly because Mal is afraid his crew are going to split up now they are rich. We also learn that first mate Zoe was a 'dust devil' terrorist who kept on fighting after the war ended.

Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale ~ it turns out Shepherd Book is not a holy man at all. As his story is told in reverse his links to the Alliance forces are revealed, but as the story goes back further more secrets about his origins tell a very different story. I wasn't sure I liked the deconstruction of the character this way or finding out who he really was, but the story was well told.

Non-fiction books

Shopping in Jail - Douglas Coupland ~ a collection of essays, including a reflection on Generation X, twenty years later. Some of his thoughts about how humans and technology could merge in the future and the development of alternate copies of human minds (stored doppelgangers or 'cloud-gangers') were thought-provoking. He had a good line about how in the past there were movements (like surrealism) that lasted decades, but now we have memes that only last a few days.

66: The World Cup in Real Time - Ian Passingham ~ I was sent this reportage style review of England's 1966 World Cup victory to review for When Saturday Comes. I thought it was an interesting way to tell a story that has been told many times before. (Published review here)

The Boy Who Wanted to Fly - Don Mullan ~ weird hagiography written by a peace campaigner in Northern Ireland whose hero was England goalkeeper Gordon Banks. I like books about goalkeepers so picked it up to add to my collection. Don's own experiences - he was a witness to the events of Bloody Sunday - are glossed over in favour of repeating the mantra that if more people were like Gordon Banks the world would be a better place.

Godless Morality - Richard Holloway ~ a thoughtful book about constructing a moral framework without the problematic issue of saying 'this is what God wants'.  Read my longer review here

Nothing - various authors ~ a collection of essays published by New Scientist on the concept of 'nothing'. From studies of what elements do when reduced to absolute zero, through to patterns in the unconscious brain, through to the development of the concept of zero as a number, this is a bit of a mixed bag and some of the essays were too similar. But there were lots of things to think about.

Marshall McLuhan - Douglas Coupland ~ unorthodox biography, notable for being Douglas Coupland's first attempt at writing a book like this. It tells McLuhan's story well, as a misunderstood predictor of the Internet age who hated technology. McLuhan is eminently quotable but only if the quotes are taken out of context. Coupland weaves in his own connections with McLuhan into the narrative, for example, taking a photo of McLuhan's grave for a fax advertising campaign in the 80s, and while this is odd in a biography it kind of works in a fitting tribute to a man whose view of the world defied convention and divided opinion in his lifetime.

God is Watching You - Dominic Johnson ~ an interesting blend of psychology and evolutionary theory that suggests supernatural beliefs about divine punishment offered an evolutionary advantage to social groups as humanity emerged. The theory suggests this has produced human beings who are hardwired to believe in supernatural agents. Controversially, this may mean society may only function optimally if people are afraid of incurring the wrath of supernatural agents. The main points of the theory are backed up by experimental research findings, but it got a bit repetitive, as if the author was trying to stretch a few papers out into a book.

How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World - Francis Wheen ~ a collection of angry essays targeting 'nonsense'. Post-modernism comes in for a hammering, as do trickle-down economics, the Left's support for radical Islam, the cult of Princess Diana, conspiracy theorists, and rapid globalisation that destroys economies in developing countries. This book was published in 2004 and could do with being updated in the light of ISIS and the post-truth politics and lies of the Brexiteers and Donald Trump.

PacMan versus Space Invaders

Or possibly both, if this image of Saturn's moon Mimas is to be believed. Possibly the most interesting space story of 2010 so far.





Full story here, complete with a reference to Mimas looking like the Death Star. Science journalism is getting geekier by the second. (And no, this ain't an April Fool, this news story broke a coupla days ago.)

Rom-coms are evil

Well, maybe not evil, but not very good for your love life - according to boffins.

This lends weight to my theory that most single chicks are single because they are waiting for a white knight/Hugh Grant/Mr Darcy to whisk them off their feet in a magical jamboree of odd coincidences, fated chance encounters and smouldering passion.

More bogus science words used to flog beauty products

From a L'Oreal advert for a wrinkle-firming product: "now with Pro-retinol A and fibro-plastyl".

Or as Cathy summed it up: "Polyfilla for your face!"

I really hate the way people use sciencey-sounding words to market stuff. I did love Newsbiscuit's reportage about L'Oreal's Nobel Prize win though!

More factoids...

This time culled from, er, Time.

There are 90 guns for every 100 citizens in the USA, making it the most heavily armed country in the world. The country with the next highest aresenal of civilian arms is India. With 4 guns for every 100 people. Four and a half million guns are purchased in the USA every year. Worldwide, only eight million guns are produced a year.

Scientists have used sugar-eating microbes from the ocean to convert food into electricity. Apparently a cup of sugar can power a 60-watt bulb for 17 hours.

And this gem of a story made it into the most emailed section of BBC News despite being almost 2 years old: Jogging your way to saggy breasts
(It's top quality research which incidentally is sponsored by a sports bra manufacturer)

Illuminated by darkness

Bit of a profound way to describe a thought I had this morning at about half 7. It was very dark this morning, and as I sat munching my wheat bisks (none of that fancy branded cereal for me) I noticed just how incredibly dark it was outside.

And then the thought struck me: What if the sun doesn’t rise today? Of course, I know that I was being ridiculous, because the earth revolves on its own axis once every 24 hours, and day was going to follow night as surely as nauseous regret follows the snaffling of a dozen mince pies. (Not that I’ve done that… recently.)

But that half moment of fear made me realise that in pre-scientific times there was no sure way of knowing, which is why the Egyptians et al used to celebrate the sunrise every day (or at least I think they did – perhaps I ought to look historical trivia like that up). And how do I really ‘know’ that stuff about the Earth on its axis, other than that I’ve been told about it and apparently there’s this invisible, un-measureable, unquantifiable thing called gravity that would stop working if the world suddenly stopped spinning. So, the sun was going to come up because we hadn’t all been catapulted off into space while we slept – what a comforting thought!

The upshot of all this frenzied brain activity was me being a bit more grateful when the sky started to lighten than I usually am.

Have we evolved to be religious?

An interesting idea that’s been put forward by Bruce Hood, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol, claims that the human mind is adapted to reason intuitively, so that it can generate theories about how the world works even when mechanisms cannot be seen or easily deduced.

Professor Hood believes that this intuitive ability can sometimes make a misguided logical leap and assign supernatural causes to something which isn’t understood. He also believes it explains why people develop a sentimental attachment to an everyday object. Most importantly he challenges Richard Dawkins’ ultra-rationalist view that supernatural belief is caused by religions spreading beliefs among the gullible minds of the young and ignorant

Instead he thinks that: “Religions may simply capitalise on a natural bias to assume the existence of supernatural forces.”

He also tried an experiment to prove his theory: he asked a group of people if they were prepared to put on an old-fashioned blue cardigan in return for a cash reward. He had no shortage of volunteers. He then told the volunteers that the cardigan used to belong to Fred West, the mass murderer.

“Most hands went down,” he said. “When people did wear it people moved away from them. It’s not actually West’s jumper. But it’s the belief that it’s West’s jumper that has the effect.

“It is as if evil, a moral stance defined by culture, has become physically manifest inside the clothing.”

So, Professor Hood concludes that "Magical thinking" is hard-wired into our brains, which means that:

"It is pointless to get people to abandon their belief systems because they operate at such a fundamental level that no amount of rational evidence or counter-evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon these ideas."

Which explains such a lot about some of the Christians I know…

As reported in the Times:
Evolution keeps us superstitious. Now that's lucky!

And in the Telegraph:
We're born with a belief in the supernatural, says scientist,

NB: Here’s a little exercise in journalistic fact-checking. In The Times, Professor Hood offers people a tenner to wear Fred West’s old cardie. In the Telegraph it’s twenty quid. Who’s right?