The Last Ditch

Does this make you excited or uncomfortable?

Answers in comments, please.

A landmark in the history of sex

Link: The Poor Mouth: A landmark in the history of sex.

I can only agree with James's comment on the linked post! This is just the sort of stuff to write if you want good stats, without compromising standards!

How do ants know what to do?

Link: TED | Talks | Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do? (video).

One of the best things on the internet is Ted.com's collection of short films of talks to TED Conferences. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Speakers are expected to give "the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes)".

I am amazed how people can dedicate their lives to tiny areas of study and in awe of how humanity (somehow) knits all that knowledge together in order to progress. This talk is a perfect example. This lady, a professor at Stanford, has spent 20 years digging in the Arizona desert to study ant colonies. Ants do not live as directed, managed communities. Their "queen" mates once, orgiastically, and spends 15-20 years laying eggs fertilised by that one collection of sperm. In a sense the colony is "hers" (she gives birth to every member; it begins with her and ends when she dies) but it seems she plays no part in directing it.

Ants have no leaders. Ants have no managers. The Bible was right (Proverbs 6:6 - 6:8)

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise. Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler provideth her meat in the Summer and gathereth her food in the harvest.

Yet ants somehow allocate tasks between them logically, and switch tasks according to the colony's need. Professor Gordon's question is "how?" and she applies what she learns to the study of human organisations. She has discovered that (as the TED site summarises it) the "...long evolution of the ant colony has resulted in a system driven by accident, adaptation and the chaos and "noise" of unconscious communication..."

Interestingly, while the Bible is right about the anarchism of the ant, it is wrong about its industry. Half of the ants are idle or (as Professor Gordon puts it, "in reserve") [No doubt New Labour will soon redesignate the unemployed and faux-sick "economically inactive" as "reserve workers".] Even more interestingly, colonies become collectively more sophisticated in their responses to events as they grow. Yet ants (other than queens) only live for one year. This is nothing to do, as she says, with "older, wiser ants."

This may have nothing to do with any of the topics usually covered here. Or maybe it does. In any event, it made me think. And there are enough good talks to be found at the site to forgive TED for having been where the liberty-destroying slideshow that grew into "An Inconvenient Truth" apparently first saw the light of day.

There are lies, damned lies, statistics and then there's ...

Link: BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Running the rule over Stern's numbers.

When even the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation's servile Government toadies journalists start to question New Labour's Holy Writ, we must surely wonder what is going on. Consider this report from BBC Online's Science pages;

Richard Tol is a professor at both Hamburg and Carnegie Mellon Universities, and is one of the world's leading environmental economists.

The Stern Review cites his work 63 times; but that does not mean he agrees with it.

"If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail.

"There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make," he told The Investigation on BBC Radio 4.

Call me a cynic. Call me a conspiracy theorist. Call me what you like but I will still pose the following questions.

Let's suppose you are a government so cash-strapped that you are closing hospitals, firing nurses and asking judges not to send criminals to jail for lack of space. Let's suppose you have already taxed your people so hard that (despite economic growth) their disposable incomes are down in real terms and they are sinking deeper into personal debt. Let's say you have already increased your official National Debt to above £500 billion for the first time. Let's say that you know (although you don't publish it) that the real debt is nearer £2 trillion including off-balance sheet PFI debt, or perhaps as much as £9 trillion including unfunded public sector pensions. Might you perhaps be tempted to encourage a tame academic on your payroll to massage his numbers? Might you want him, perhaps, consistently to pick (according to Professor Tol);

the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make

Might you be happy when your highly-paid and knighted employee (perhaps even in line for a peerage when the present unpleasantness dies down)

double counts, particularly the risks and ... underestimates what development and adaptation will do to impacts

Might you possibly be happy to use his "F" grade analysis to justify draconian "green taxes," Orwellian schemes for monitoring the vehicle movements of every citizen or vicious attacks on the lifestyles of your class enemies?

Heavens no. That would be ridiculous. Why, based on your record of 10 years of honest, "whiter than white" government, would any reasonable citizen possibly possibly ask such questions?

EnviroSpin Watch

Link: EnviroSpin Watch.

Only recently I was denounced as a "climate change denier" (an irritating phrase, with its obvious attempt at subconscious association with "holocaust denier"). The Green doing the denouncing scoffed that it's now equivalent to being a flat-earther. That's annoying. I wasn't denying the climate was changing. It is. It always is. I was just suggesting that the causal link to human activity was unproven.

The "Proceedings of the Royal Society A, October 3rd, 2006. Full title: ‘Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions’. Authors: Henrik Svensmark, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, Nigel Marsh, Martin Enghoff & Ulrik Uggerhøj" seem to suggest that I may be right and the self-righteous prat in question wrong.