Yikes!

Posted on January 1, 2007 by acb

There is a very simple bit of javascript which will steal and display your entire Gmail contact list if you run it when are logged into Gmail. I have just tested it here, and got back a list of 103 names. I had no idea there were so many people with whom I had corresponded from that address; nor why Richard Dawkins appears on it twice. But Google had better fix the hole damn quick.

Posted in nördig | 2 Comments

Annual silliness

Posted on January 1, 2007 by acb

Rachel has tagged (spattered?) me with one of those nasty meme things. If I do it now, that’s my lot for the year. So, here goes: five things you had no reason to know about me, and which I don’t mind sharing with the world. That last stipulation, I know, rules out the possibility that they might be very interesting.

  1. I grew up pretty much bilingual in English and Serbo-Croat because we moved to Belgrade when I was three. After six months in an English boarding school, I had forgotten all my serbo-croat by the time I was nine. I can now just about spell out words in cyrillic, and I remember the Serbian word for “arse”.
  2. When I was fourteen, I made quite a lot of pocket money selling dry flies to the local fishing shop.
  3. I was thrown out of Bedales when I was sixteen, so I never went to university, nor even acquired any A levels.
  4. I was entirely happy in the autumn of 1986, playing trivial pursuit machines in pubs. I did not pay for an evening’s drinking for three months.
  5. The night that Windsor Castle burnt, I was the only journalist inside the building, since I was attending a seminar in the library.

In a spirit of seasonal misanthropy, I nominate Jorun Boklöv, Fred Clark, Rafe Coburn, and Larry Moran.

Posted in Blather | 7 Comments

Why no knighthood for Saddam Hussein?

Posted on December 30, 2006 by acb

If John Scarlett could get a knighthood for helping to get us into the war, and for services in the fight against Al-Qaeda, it seems very unfair that Saddam Hussein could not, too. After all, he did as much as he could to assist in the belief that his government had WMDs; he suppressed al-Qaeda ruthlessly when he had the chance, as well as many of the other enemies of the British governent at the moment. Too bad he seems to have concentrated on buying the Australian Wheat Board rather than the Labour Party.

Posted in War | 2 Comments

slikewatch in Berkeley

Posted on December 29, 2006 by acb

There is a paper referenced in Language Log which charts the use of “all” as a quotative in Californian speech over the last decade. It seems to be falling out of favour, replaced in this usage by “like”, so that the cool kids no longer say “and I’m, all, Dude, where’s my car?” but “and I’m, like, Dude, where’s my car?”

This was fine enough, but what I liked was the diagram showing a search pattern the authors used on Google. All human life is here:

likewhoa.png

Posted in Science without worms | 1 Comment

Twelve great Britons

Posted on December 29, 2006 by acb

A spasm of irritation at some posturing lefty in the Independent made me wonder what my list of twelve great Britons would be. Here is something like it. They are chosen because they all changed the world and all are admirable in some way or other. Complete bastards are excluded, which knocks out William the conqueror:

  • Alfred the Great
  • Thomas Cranmer
  • Thomas More Shakespeare (I thought I had done this)
  • Edward Gibbon James Clerk Maxwell
  • Newton
  • Hume
  • William Wilberforce
  • Darwin
  • Elizabeth Fry Horatio Nelson
  • Churchill
  • Wellington
  • Milton

UPDATE: (changes on the following grounds: Without Nelson, Wilberforce would have been unable to carry through the abolition. Shakespeare has to be there. Mrs Tilton persuaded me to drop More. Rupert makes his point about Maxwell.)

Posted in British politics | 14 Comments

Scott Atran rips open Sam Harris

Posted on December 28, 2006 by acb

Fantastic stuff here, (jump to Scott Atran) pointing towards a scientifically informed study of religion. To get there, of course, it is necessary first to remove the sillinesses of pharyngular atheism and dogmatic assertions about “religion” based on nothing but intuition. So, take it away, Dr. Atran:

Core religious ideas serve as conceptual signposts that help to socially coordinate other beliefs and behaviors in given contexts. Although they have no more fixed or stable propositional content than do poetic metaphors, they are not processed figuratively in the sense of an optional and endless search for meaning. Rather they are thought to be right, whatever they may mean, and to require those who share such beliefs to commune and converge on an appropriate interpretation for the context at hand. To claim that one knows what Judaism or Christianity is truly about because one has read the Bible, or that what Islam is about because one has read the Qur’an and Hadith, is to believe that there is an essence to religion and religious beliefs. But science (and the history of exegesis) demonstrates that this claim is false.

Posted in God | 4 Comments

Name that spiritual leader

Posted on December 27, 2006 by acb

Who said at Christmas this year: %(loony)“Many people say I embarrass them with my humility.”%?

Please put your guesses in comments before you look up [the answer.]

Posted in God | 5 Comments

The speed of spaghetti affects the shape

Posted on December 22, 2006 by acb

Jeremy Ahouse sends me an amazingly good story from The Scientist about protein folding. As you know, proteins are made of a long chain, or chains, of amino acids folded up on themselves in complicated ways to make nubbly shapes, like an armchair modelled out of macaroni. The chains are assembled one link at a time by mRNAs which read off a triplet codon from the DNA and fetch the corresponding amino acid to attach it. So think of a piece of spaghetti emerging and coiling up as it does so. But different codons can code for the same amino acid, and so there are different mRNAs that do the same thing.

since the sequence of the protein is the same, an allele which differs from another only in the codons it uses to represent the same amino acids is regarded as being the same gene. The change can be significant for things like DNA fingerprinting, but not, it was thought, for anything else.

What the paper argues is that proteins made with rarer codons (for the same amino acid) may fold differently to those made with more common ones; and since the funcion of proteins is actually determined by their shape, they work differently, too. In particular, the researchers looked at a protein which helps pump anti-cancer drugs through cell walls, and found that some forms worked much worse than others with the same drugs.

It’s all a bit tentative as yet, and I may have got some or all of the details right, but it is a wonderful indication of just how complicated the meccano of life must be.

Posted in Science without worms | Comments Off on The speed of spaghetti affects the shape

Is theology nonsense (no 599968 in an ongoing series)?

Posted on December 21, 2006 by acb

Interesting piece in the TLS (I hope it’s not paywalled) by Thomas Dixon, who has organised a conference to which I think I am going next summer, rounding up a bunch of science-and-theology books. One of them appears to be making large claims for the Pascal Boyer explanation of religion as consisting (1) of beliefs about supernatural beings, which (2) are generated by the hyperactivity of our agency-detection mechanisms.

Boyer is a very smart guy, and these ideas are possibly true. But they are not an explanation of religion because it can’t just be reduced to a belief in supernatural beings. Any coherent explanation has to balance social function with psychological origin. If I think a particular seashell is precious, I am either deluded or a child. There are psychological explanations in either case, which are entirely valid and satisfying. But if my tribe trades in cowries, I may be rich as well. That’s something that psychology alone can’t explain.

Posted in God | 2 Comments

living well

Posted on December 21, 2006 by acb

One of the most creative areas of British journalism is the creation of synonyms for “notorious drunk”. Such people exist in British public life, but the constraints of libel laws mean that you would be very very foolish to say so. Even in obituaries, the preferred term is “convivial”. But I caught a lovely new phrase in the Times report of a distinguished Scottish lawyer arrested after an air rage incident at Heathrow. The man in question is “known as a bon viveur.”

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment