Myanmar/Burma and the US against the rest of us
According to this map (click on it for more information), there are now only two countries in the world that haven’t adopted the metric system: Myanmar/Burma and the US.
It’s a bit strange to see that the UK has been allowed the colour blue – perhaps they should have assigned a different colour to countries that have changed over officially, but where people still use different units in practice.
I just wish there was a way to make the US go metric, too – so long as the largest English-speaking country is using imperial measures, it will be really hard for the UK to let go completely.
Anĝaĝinax̂
Danish newspapers are reporting that Danish scientists have decoded the DNA from an individual from the Greenlandic Saqqaq culture (which died out completely).
According to their results, they were most closely related to the Aleut people.
If this is the case, I don’t quite understand why they called the individual Inuk (“person” in Greenlandic), rather than anĝaĝinax̂, which is the modern Aleut word.
Hmmm, I wonder whether the Aleuts could demand to get Greenland back from the Inuits? 
Unlikely intelligence
The Independent reports that professor Conway Morris has claimed that “alien biospheres will be strikingly similar to the terrestrial equivalent and that in such biospheres intelligence will inevitably emerge”.
From statements such as this one, one would have thought that intelligence had developed many times during the history of this planet.
For instance, it’s reasonable to assume that life on planets with similar gravity and air density will have quadrupeds, bipeds and flying animals, and that eyes and ears and brains are all likely to develop.
Just think about how similar the body shapes of fish, dolphins and ichthyosaurs are, although they have very different origins.
However, it doesn’t seem to be the case that human-level intelligence has ever developed before on Earth.
This makes me wonder whether there’s something about high intelligence that makes it almost impossible as an evolutionary strategy.
I think I read somewhere that there is genetic evidence that the human race almost died out before it really got started (cannot find the link just now), so although we were eventually very successful, it was hard to get there.
Another way of looking at it is that there has only been human-level intelligence for approximately 100,000 years out of the past 500,000,000 years (the time of the Cambrian explosion), or 0.02% of the time.
I wish somebody could explain to me why high intelligence never appeared before. Surely evolution could have produced it many times, and much sooner, if only it had been a successful evolutionary strategy.
Laboratory Earth
It appears that there are many more scientists who think our civilisation is heating our planet up more than would have been the case otherwise than there are qualified people thinking otherwise, and I therefore do think it’s foolish to avoid taking strong measures to combat global warming.
However, as the recent Copenhagen summit showed, the evidence is not yet so overwhelming that all of humanity can be convinced, and it’s therefore very hard to achieve any meaningful emission cuts.
We therefore need to get more evidence and refute all major competing theories.
One of the alternative favourite theories cited by the opponents of global warming is solar activity.
I therefore found this article (written before the current cold spell began) very interesting:
But how to prove this? During the 20th century, solar activity rose steadily, as did the amount of industrial gases being pumped into the atmosphere. With both quantities rising, it has been impossible to distinguish between them. Now, that has all changed.
In the past 12 months solar activity has fallen to levels unseen since the 1920s. Sunspots have become rare sights and for three quarters of this year the Sun has been spot-free. According to one study if the trend continues at its current rate, the Sun will lose its ability to produce sunspots by 2015. That would take it back to its condition in the latter 17th century, when hardly any sunspots appeared for 70 years — and Northern Europe underwent the worst years of the so-called Little Ice Age.
Winter scenes from this period were romanticised by artists such as Brueghel painting frost fairs and hunting scenes. But was the 17th century sunspot crash responsible for the Little Ice Age or a coincidence? Could we now find ourselves plunged into a similar freeze if the sunspots do not return?
I’m well aware that the current cold spell doesn’t disprove global warming in the slightest. One possible consequence of global warming could be the Gulf Stream moving or stopping completely, and that would make the British Isles even colder than they are at the moment.
It will be interesting to see if the solar activity theory can be complete refuted within a few years, though.
Apples and oranges, beer and ecstasy
Most people commenting on the sacking of the government’s drug czar, Professor Nutt, have taken the view that one has to choose between science and prejudice.
However, I think he can be criticised also on the basis of bad science.
I admit I haven’t read any of his reports, so my comments are based on quotes in articles, and they might of course have been misleading.
It seems to be well-established that he thinks horse-riding is more dangerous than ecstasy:
Nutt wrote in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that 10 people in Britain died a year from horse riding — or “equasy” as he called it — and that it was associated with more than 100 road traffic accidents annually.“Based on these harms, it seems likely that the ACMD would recommend control (for equasy) under the Misuse of Drugs Act perhaps as a Class A drug given it appears more harmful than ecstasy,” he said.
Between 35 and 50 people die each year in England and Wales from ecstasy, currently ranked as one of the most dangerous Class A drugs, along with heroin and cocaine, according to government figures.
But Nutt said ecstasy was proportionately less dangerous, causing acute harm only in one in every 10,000 cases, compared to one in 350 cases for horse riding.
Unless I’m misunderstanding him, he seems simply to count the number of deaths and accidents without comparing them to the number of people who take part in these activities
Although I haven’t found a good quotation, it seems to me he’s doing the same for alcohol, i.e., he says it’s really dangerous because it kills so many alcoholics and causes so many accidents.
However, alcohol is used by the vast majority of the population, and on a very regular basis by many of them.
So to compare alcohol with cannabis, or horse-riding with ecstasy, you have to find two comparable groups, e.g., 100 teenagers drinking alcohol but not using cannabis at all and another 100 teenagers using cannabis but never touching alcohol.
Otherwise you’re comparing apples and oranges, which is useless.
If Professor Nutt had it his way, alcohol would be completely banned, and the entire population would move to the new legal drugs such as ecstasy. After a few years, there wouldn’t be any deaths caused by alcohol any more, but hundreds of people would be crashing their car after taking ecstasy, and his classification would have to be changed.
No respect for engineering
There’s a post on John Redwood’s blog, which has comments that largely are more interesting than the article itself.
Do read through the comments if you’ve got the time.
Here follow a few excepts.
“Bill” wrote: “There are some exceptions of course, in the aerospace industry in particular, but manufacturing does not attract the brightest and the best, they go into the law, medicine, the city. Not so in Germany [...]“
“Mick Anderson” wrote: “As for “careers in engineering” – if your primary choice of employers are all small companies, you are limited in how you can grow your skills. Small companies need people who can adapt to fill many roles – this is a useful skill in this environment, but not a route to a seat on the board of a multi-national! Let’s face it, the entire board of directors for the average engineering firm is often the two blokes who initially started the company in a garage.”
“Simon D” wrote: “However, there are huge cultural problems. The last thing that the home counties and metropolitan middle class want is for Julian and Samantha to end up in manufacturing after all that sweat over their education. Far better to be a City lawyer or banker or some kind of media hot shot. Working for Government quangos is also OK. Better paid and better prospects. The last thing anybody needs is to be stuck in some failing manufacturing town in the Midlands or the North of England.”
“OurSally” wrote: “So, now we’re long gone you suddenly decide you need us after all. We engineers left the country in the 80s and 90s, leaving the rest of you to handle low wages, stupid managers and people who think engineers repair cars. Here in Germany we get a constant stream of disaffected Brits looking for (and finding) a better world. We get paid as much as doctors, and a Dipl.Ing. commands the same respect as a professor. [...] You want us back? Pay decent wages, copyright the word Engineer, give us 6 weeks holiday and Christmas boni and a decent canteen.”
“Brian E” wrote: “When I had contacts with the Germans, I was always addressed as “Herr Ing” and treated with the same respect as Doctors and Lawyers. The French had a similar attitude and there engineering is treated as probably the top profession; in both countries the pay reflects the status of the work, unlike the UK where it is probably the worst paid of all those occupations requiring formal qualifications. [...] Yes I enjoyed my work, but in retirement I am probably the worst off of all the various professionals that I know and would certainly not recommend anyone intending to work in he UK to go into engineering.”
“Daedalus” wrote: “And then you have the engineers reporting at a lower level to production all to drive down the costs of employing you. The thought of getting a job that pays £65K is a dream for most engineers.”
It’s interesting how not a single commenter tried to defend the current situation.
A body that requires a brain
One thing about human evolution that has been puzzling me for years is that there are several areas where the human body seems to be dependent on a highly developed brain:
- Human head hair (and to some extent, facial hair) just keeps growing, which means it will need to be cut, combed and/or washed. While this is hardly a problem for modern humans, I wonder what an animal with the intelligence of a chimpanzee would do if it developed human head hair.
- The same applies to human nails. The ones on the hands might be worn down through use, or by biting one’s nails, but the nails on the feet tend to require some attention. Do apes have similar nails, and if so, how do they cut them?
- Finally, the human buttocks are so big that fæces tends to get stuck, which is why we use toilet paper (in other cultures, water is used instead). Monkeys and apes tend to have smaller buttocks that are less likely to get filthy, but again I’m not certain what they would do if their buttocks evolved to look like their human counterparts.
In short, I can’t see how human head hair, nails and buttocks could have evolved before the human brain was sophisticated enough to invent combs, knives and toilet paper.
Perhaps it’s not really a problem – I could well be that these features turned up very recently.
I have just always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that the modern human brain was more recent that the human body, but perhaps it’s really the way round.
Genetic engineering of fruits
Am I the only one who loves the taste of pineapples and mangos but finds them a pain?
Pineapples are far too complicated to get into, and mangos have this horrible big stone in the middle.
All fruit should either be very easy to peel, like bananas, or have edible skin, like apples, and they shouldn’t contain any stones or seeds.
Why are the genetic engineers wasting their time on making wheat resistant to herbicides and other boring projects, when they should be developing pinanas (pineapples with banana skin) and pangos (mangos built like a pear, without a stone and with edible skin)?
The technology surely is there, so bring it on!