Once Scotland becomes independent, it would be natural to get its own international calling code instead of the British +44.

My guess is that Scotland would get +424 – it’s similar to +44, it’s available, and it’s in the European block.

There’s of course nothing that would prevent Scotland from stopping there, resulting in phone numbers such as +424 (0)141 639 9718. However, this would be unnecessarily long.

There are only two three-digit area codes in Scotland, (0)141 (Glasgow) and (0)131 (Edinburgh); these could easily be mapped to one-digit codes instead, such as (0)4 and (0)3.

Similarly, the four-digit codes could be mapped to two-digit ones, e.g., (0)24 instead of (0)1224 (Aberdeen). (See all the current area codes here.)

After shortening the area codes, all Scottish phone numbers would effectively have only eight digits in total, so perhaps the area codes could be permanently fused with the phone numbers, just like it happened in Denmark a few decades ago.

A few examples:

Area	Current	1st stage	2nd stage
Glasgow, 0141	+44 (0)141 639 9718	+424 (0)4 639 9718	+424 4639 9718
Edinburgh, 0131	+44 (0)131 348 5200	+424 (0)3 348 5200	+424 3348 5200
Aberdeen, 01224	+44 (0)1224 272 000	+424 (0)24 272 000	+424 2427 2000
Isle of Arran, 01770	+44 (0)1770 600 341	+424 (0)17 600 341	+424 1760 0341

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The UK government’s recent idea to move the UK from GMT/BST to CET/CEST and the Scottish Government’s refusal to play along is quite interesting.

Let’s have a look at various locations in the UK and compare it with a city on the same longitude but further south, Málaga:

Equinox (23/09/2011):

Obviously there’s not much difference between any of these locations, and one might argue that CEST is a better time zone at this time of the year.

Summer solstice (21/06/2011):

At all of the UK locations, the sun rises at an impossibly early time, so either time zone is feasible in the morning. In the evening, either time zone is feasible in Scotland, but I can understand if people in London would rather have brighter evenings.

Winter solstice (22/12/2011):

This is the problematic time. In London, it’s probably not a big deal whether the sun rises at 9 instead of 8, and they would enjoy having daylight until 5pm (and this tendency is even more pronounced in Málaga). However, in Northern Ireland and Scotland, it would mean not seeing the sun till around 10am in the winter, which makes for very depressing mornings.

I must therefore support the Scottish Government’s stance on this – moving to a time zone further east makes good sense the further south you are, but north of 50°N it’s not a good idea (remember also that most of the UK is further west than London).

I probably believe so more strongly because of growing up in Denmark. In Denmark, schools normally start at 8am, not at 9am like in Scotland. The effect is therefore the same as if Scotland moved to CE(S)T. And I must say that I found going to school in the winter utterly depressing, and I was very happy to move to a country where people get up later in the morning.

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So Happy New Year (or should that be Happy New Kiloday?)!

It’s a very special day, of course. The beginning of kiloday 70 took place on the 19th of May 1984, so quite a lot has happened in the past myriaday (metric decade), and I guess the celebrations last night would have rivalled the millennium parties if only this calendar had been adopted already.

I actually wonder whether myriadays would be a better way of remembering history than either decades or centuries – have a look at this:

First day	Old calendar
70,000	19 May 1984	Collapse of communism, rise of Islamist terrorism and globalisation
60,000	1 January 1957	The Cold War, building the welfare state, oil crisis
50,000	16 August 1929	The Depression and WWII
40,000	31 March 1902	The build-up to WWI, the war itself, and the boom afterwards
30,000	12 November 1874	The second industrial revolution
20,000	27 June 1847	Revolutions and civil war

It’ll be interesting to find out what will happen in this metric decade, which will end on the 19th of February 2039 (by which time I’ll be 67 years, or rather 24 kilodays old).

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π is often given an almost mythical status, so I found it very refreshing when I was made aware of the τ movement that argue that τ = 2π is a much more natural constant.

There are lots of good arguments in favour (do follow the link above), and I’m definitely a convert.

However, as Stewart Russell pointed out to me on Facebook, physicists already have other uses for τ, so perhaps a better symbol could be chosen.

I would propose the Georgian letter ტ (pronounced tari), which doesn’t seem to have any uses in maths or physics.

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While sampling some nice beer in Århus earlier this year with my good old friend Thomas Mailund, we had an interesting discussion about how long our genes live on for.

I was reminded of this discussion when I managed to find my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on Google. His name was Georg Widmann, and he was born around 1532 in Heiningen in Württemberg.

However, as I discussed a few years ago, we get half our genes from our father and the other half from our mother; we therefore get 25% from each grandparent, 12.5% from each great-grandparent, etc., so when do we reach a point when there’s nothing left?

According to Wikipedia, the “haploid human genome contains ca. 23,000 protein-coding genes”. 23,000 can be halved 14.49 times, which equals around 435 years (at a generation length of 30), and this means that any ancestor born before the year 1575 is likely to have contributed less than one gene to our genome. (Georg is of course an exception – ignoring the possibility of adultery and mutations, my Y chromosome is an exact copy of his.)

One can look at the numbers differently, too. Genes are defined by the “2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome”. 2,900,000,000 can be halved 31.43 times, taking us back 943 years to the year 1157, but that will include ancestors who have only contributed junk DNA.

The “human genome contains vast regions of DNA the function of which, if any, remains unknown. These regions in fact comprise the vast majority, by some estimates 97%, of the human genome size.” 3% of 2.9 billion base pairs is 87 million base pairs, which would take us back 791 years to the year 1219.

However, the “nucleotide diversity between humans is about 0.1%, which is 1 difference per 1,000 base pairs.” That would take us down to 87,000 base pairs that actually matter, and that number can be halved 16.41 times, which would take us back 492 years to the year 1608.

To conclude, I’m not absolutely sure what the cut-off point should be. There’s definitely no point in doing genealogy further back than the year 1157 (except for pure patrilineal and matrilineal descent), but there are good arguments also for stopping in 1219, 1575 or 1608.

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Marcel, Charlotte and I left Phyllis and the wee ones on the sandy beach in Lyme Regis and walked over to the Jurassic cliffs on Manmouth Beach.

We had heard it was a good place to find ammonites, so I was hoping to find an incomplete chunk or two.

What I didn’t expect was to find the beach littered with huge, complete ammonite shells like the one on the photo!

On the other hand, we didn’t find any small ones we could take home. Whether that was because they had already been removed by other fossil hunters, or whether only the big ones fossilise well, I don’t know.

What I do know is that we met several other people with big hammers that they used to split the stones with. We had to restrict ourselves to chucking the stones onto the hard ground, which is not quite as efficient.

So next time, we’ll bring hammers, chisels and a sturdy rucksack!

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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