Morts Musings

It’s probably old news for many, but I’ve just found out about the Ig Noble Prizes, and as a geek, both flippant & scientific, I have to say I think it’s a bloody marvellous idea!

The prizes are awarded, each year, by Improbable Research an organisation whose purpose is to highlight scientific “research that makes people laugh and then think”. They operate year round, bringing news of off the wall science to the masses (well, ok, maybe just masses of geeks,) but their big event each year is the Ig Noble prizes, where prizes are given out in a range of categories, much like the real Noble prizes.

The 2010 prizes aren’t due to be awarded until the end of September, but some of the highlights from the 2009 roll of honour include:
VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: to the researchers who discovered that named cows produce more milk than unnamed animals.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: to the team who synthesised diamonds from tequilla. (I knew there had to be some use for the vile stuff!)
MEDICINE PRIZE: to the man who cracked the knuckles on just one of his hands every day, for 50 years! in order to demonstrate that the activity doesn’t cause arthritis.
LITERATURE PRIZE: to the Irish Police, for issuing over 50 speeding tickets to one “Prawo Jazdy”, a Polish phrase meaning “Driving License”.

My favourite from last years awards has to be the winner of the “Public Health Prize” though. Elena N. Bodnar and her team received the award for inventing a bra which can be converted into a gas mask, or to be exact, a pair of gas masks.

Really, I’m not making this up, SEE -even the BBC reported it!

I guess the idea is that most woman wear bras most of the time, which I suppose means that the “life saving” lingerie is always likely to be available, should the need arise, &, even better, each woman in the area of the attack would be able to offer a hand (or should that be cup?) to someone less well prepared.

My mother used to tell me to change my pants in case I got hit by a bus, which always struck me as odd since I imagine that, even if the pants were clean that morning, the no doubt frightening ordeal of being hit by a large, heavy vehicle would ensure that they were no longer clean by the time the paramedics arrived.
In the future are young woman going to have their mothers telling them to make sure their underwear is clean? Just in case there’s a gas attack and they’re forced to share half their bra with a stranger -imagine the embarrasment of having to offer a stranger a slightly soiled bra-come-gas mask! never mind that they may be more concerned by life threatening gas, or somewhat distracted by the spectacle of women around them frantically removing their tops!
In fact it might end up making gas attacks a somewhat salacious affair, which I suppose, in it’s own right, might not be a bad deterrent to the evil doers of this world, or at least those who hold strong views about women showing as little skin as possible.

I also wonder if this lingerie-lifeline is merely the tip of the iceberg, in future are we to be treated to a whole range of everyday items which double as emergency equipment? Maybe household furniture which can be quickly converted into a nuclear bunker? (scarily not so far from official govt advice, during the cold war era, as to how the public should protect themselves in the event of the 4 minute warning sounding.) Or perhaps M&S will start stocking little black party dresses which, in the event of a terror attack, quickly convert into a full NBC suit?

So, the Copenhagen summit is drawing to it’s exciting close when we’re to be treated to the spectacle of Obama saving the world with a last minute agreement which will be met with unanimous, rapturous approval by all 190 odd countries involved, and do enough to tackle the effects of anthropogenic climate change, so that future generations won’t be totally screwed.
Obviously, Obama’s chief sidekick boy-wonder Brown has been in Copenhagen for the last few days attempting to build a consensus, & generally trying to look like someone who’s worthy of re-election, or rather, I suppose that should be election, since he wasn’t voted in by anyone.

In anycase it looks like the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is set to be a massive failure; We’ll probably get some kind of ineffectual, face-saving agreement pulled out of the fire at the very last moment, but the chances that it amounts to anything substantive, let alone does enough to combat the dangers which climate change pose to all of us, not to mention future generations, are in my opinion very depressingly slim indeed.

A big sticking point seems to be the Kyoto protocal; it seems like everyone who didn’t sign up for it wants to keep it, while those who did would rather sort out a new agreement which includes those who didn’t. To be honest I have more sympathy with the Kyoto signatories, it seems stupid to try and insist that a group of developed nations, which don’t include the US, should abide by an agreement when the world’s two largest pollutors, the US and China, aren’t to be bound in the same way; frankly we need them on board if we’re to achieve the kinds of CO₂ reductions which the science suggests are necessary.

Ultimately I wonder if this is where humanity demonstrates that it is an evolutionary dead end; short-sighted greed seems to be stymying attempts at taking longer term action to solve a problem which stands to effect us all, or rather the next generation. The impacts of climate change are already being seen in some of the world’s poorest regions, and yet relatively petty arguments between nations look set to make a farse of the Copenhagen Summit.
Faced with such monumentally selfish stupidity I guess we just have to hope that, against the vast weight of evidence to the contrary, it turns out that the climate sceptics are right, and it’s not going to be too great a problem.
Not a comforting thought at all!

Coming as it does during a period when many of the world’s major economies are still crawling their ways out of recession there have been question marks about how successful the 2009 Dubai Airshow would be in terms of generating sales for it’s exhibitors.

However, as the show progresses it would appear that it’s not all doom and gloom for the aviation industry. It seems that this year’s big winner will most likely be the military hardware sector, and it’s no surprise that companies which produce military aircraft are lining up to take part in the show, one consultancy recently estimated that Middle Eastern spending on military aircraft would top £100bn by 2014.
Amid all the clamour and competition it’s nice to see a British company, BAE, managing to grab it’s share of the sales. It would appear that so far they’re having a pretty good show, as part of the consortium which makes the Eurofighter Typhoon they’ll no doubt have been buoyed up by how much interest the jet fighter has generated from Gulf States during the airshow.

BAE have also generated quite a bit of buzz with the annoucement that their unmanned Mantis aircraft completed it’s maiden test flight recently. This is particularly significant since the Mantis is the first ever fully autonomous, twin-engined UAV. It hasn’t all been military hardware for BAE though, their Avro Business Jet has also proved popular; not only has it been selected by the governments of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as their VIP aircraft, it’s also won orders from the British firm Infinite Engineering Services.

Another big piece of news from the show is the annoucement by the UAE’s national carrier, Etihad, of a £750m investment package to enhance their operations across the board; no doubt they’ve got a few quid to splash around after all the flights to Dubai which they sold to those attending the airshow.

So, maybe the doom mongers are wrong; some sections of the civilian aviation industry might still be looking a little flat but overall it’s obviously far from penniless, and military spending never seems to go out of fashion. Overall it looks like the speculation that the Airshow would be a complete and utter flop may have been a little premature.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Govt reject the advice of experts when they fail to come to the conclusion’s which the Govt would like them to, but to me the sacking of Dr Nutt, chair of the Govt’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, last weekend, when he had the termerity to give an expert opinion which contradicts the Govts uninformed, but official, line, sums up the hubris & utter arrogance which have been hallmarks of both the Brown and Blair govts.

It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation?
OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures!

There’s also the fact that history has shown that prohibition doesn’t work, where someone stands to make a profit you’ll just get a black market economy spring up to meet consumer demand for prohibited goods. As things stand in this country millions of otherwise perfectly law abiding, productive members of society are criminalised because they want, and choose, to smoke cannabis. If the govt truly represented the people they’d accept that for most users cannabis is a relatively benign substance with minimal knock on effects for wider society, and they’d legalise it.
Yes I said legalise it, forget decriminalisation, although it’s often touted as an acceptable method for govt to look the other way and quietly accept that maybe cannabis isn’t such an evil drug after all, decriminalisation is in fact the worst of both worlds from a societal point of view. Users are still forced to interact with the black market, organised criminals, in order to get the stuff, and this has a number of wider implications. It means that there aren’t any safe guards on quality, no product information in terms of the strength of any particular batch, and most importantly of all, money spent on cannabis is going to support organised crime!
On the other hand if it were legalised these issues could all be eliminated; users could be sure they knew what they were getting, and wouldn’t be funding criminals, but on the contrary could be providing revenue for govt.

At a time when we’re being told that, due to the banking bail out, our country is going to be in debt for decades to come you’d think that the govt might be open to new means of raising revenue. The Home Office estimates that in 2006 the UK drug trade was worth between £3.5 and £5.8 billion, not enough to solve the country’s money woes, but getting a slice of any figure which is measured in the billions isn’t to be sniffed at!

Really it seems like a no brainer to me. Now that “the genie’s out of the bottle” it’s never going away, people are going to take these drugs, they’ll find a way to get them because someone else can make money from supplying them. When even the experts are saying that dope is less harmful than substances which society already makes freely available, why can’t the govt just get over the outdated dogma that “drugs are bad m’kay” and do the thing which would benefit everbody except the organised criminals?

This piece in the New Scientist lays out the wider picture, in terms of the govt’s rocky relationship with it’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. There’s also a petition running on the No. 10 site here, if you want to join the call to re-instate Dr Nutt.

While doing my rounds of various news sites during a quiet spot earlier, I came across an article called Study Predicts Effect of Global Warming on Spring Flowers, on NASA’s Earth Observatory site.

The study in question was carried out by British and Australian academics & investigated the likely effects of global warming on flowers, and other plant species. My first reaction was actually pedantic rage brought on by NASA’s use of the phrase “Global Warming“. All too often this term is used incorrectly as a synonym for climate change, and it’s one of my pet hates, since the label “global warming” implies that climate change will lead to warmer weather globally; whereas the reality of climate change is that some places will get hotter while others get colder, or that specific locations will become hotter in the summers but get colder winters than they’ve previously experienced.

In short, climate change comes down to much more than the idea that everythings going to get warmer, & I believe imprecise use of the term “global warming”, when one is talking about climate change as a whole, only adds confusion to a debate which is already bogged down in misunderstanding, statistical chicanery, &, at times, downright dishonesty.
For a start it implies that everywhere is going to get warmer, which makes some people wonder “What’s the problem, hotter summers would be nice!”, but it also gives especially ignorant anthropogenic climate change sceptics an excuse to crow on about how “global warming” is a myth, whenever it snows badly, or there’s a cold snap. Of course, what the poor fools are missing is that climate change could very well lead to much hotter, wetter summers for us in the UK, but leave us (in worse case scenarios) with winters they’d be more familar with in Moscow; London’s only a few degrees of latitude south of Moscow, and if the Gulf Stream &/or Jet stream were to pack up it’s likely that the UK would become a good deal colder!

In anycase misuse of “global warming” to mean “climate change” it’s one of my pet hates, and it especially grates when a source which should know better does it, hence my initial reaction to the piece. However, on reading through it I discovered that I had perhaps been too hasty, as the piece in question appears to be looking at a “global warming” scenario, rather than climate change as a whole; Of course how much validity there is in a study which is predicting an overall warming pattern, rather than considering the possibility that weather will become more extreme, and erractic, all round is another question entirely, and one which I’ll maybe rant about another day.

OK, “sloppy use of precise terms” rant aside, what did the study actually conclude. Essentially the results shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, in the sense that generally speaking, it found that warmer winters would lead to plants flowering earlier; However, the predicted scale of these changes is quite surprising. Roughly speaking, for every 1^oC that average air temperature rises, plants will start flowering 11 days earlier, although this figure could vary between 7 and 16 days per ^oC, depending on whether the local climate is oceanic or continental, and how exactly it’s effected by climate change in the longer run.
Near the start of the article it’s stated that flowers could be appearing “as much as 50 days” earlier, than they currently do, by 2080, but, cynic that I am, I assume this figure is based on more extreme climate change predictions, in order to produce an eye-catching headline.

“So what’s the problem?” you may be asking; how do flowers appearing earlier in the year have a negative impact on anyone, except for possibly shops which sell flowers losing sales around Valentine’s day. The answer is that, most likely, there wouldn’t be any direct negative effects for humans, but when one thinks about the numbers of other species, particularly insects, whose life cycles rely in some way on flowers, and other species who, in turn, rely on those species, it’s clear that ecologically this could be a pretty big deal.
A great deal of effort is spent on highlighting how climate change might end up directly effecting humans, and while that is definitely a worthy goal, I think that too often it’s wider ecological effects are only vaguely touched upon. The stark truth is that, despite all of our scientific advances, humanity’s welfare is still, very much, tied to the ecosphere which we inhabit, and if other species which play important roles in the ecosystem start to fail then the overall impact of climate change could be far greater than many realise.