Living in God's test tube.

I follow no religion. I have no evidence to suggest there is a God, and no proof there isn't. Just want to make that clear.

Now, to borrow an Americanism and turn it into decent English - I'm about to get all religious on your bottom.

I watched this rather dull speaker who nonetheless made interesting points. It made me theorise (science-speak for 'think a bit'). The video is 20 minutes so you'll need some time to hear him. It's not vital to the rest of the post.

First, an assumption. Nothing wrong with that, science does it all the time. Let us assume that there is a God. If you're determined there isn't then you might as well skip the rest because without that assumption, none of the rest matters.

So. The way Genesis is written. man appears to be an afterthought. God makes light, the universe, the Earth, plants a garden, makes animals and then thinks 'Hey, I know. I'll make little beasties who look like me. They can look after the garden'. In other words, we're not the highest species. We're the gardeners.

Sounds unlikely for a supreme being. Surely the creation of humanity was the whole point, and the rest would have been built to support that? Otherwise, why bother with religion? Gardeners don't worship their bosses.

Second (anthropic) assumption, then. God made all of it so he could have people around.

Okay. First problem, why make so much of it? Why all those stars, all those planets, all those galaxies? Why not just this one solar system? In fact, what do we even need the other planets for?

Third assumption (one already in place viz. Christianity): God gave us free will.

In that case, God can't reveal himself. If he does, free will is gone. We don't have free will to deny something we can see. I can't deny the existence of China because I've seen it. I can deny the existence of Belgium, even though it's silly, because I haven't. I don't, in case you're wondering.

So how to work this? If God wants beings with free will, specifically with the freedom to choose whether or not to believe in him, he can't do anything that would prove his existence. Once proven, pop goes free choice.

Now I'm going to blaspheme. I'm going to rewrite Genesis. I hear a mass hiss of breath sucked through teeth, even now.

One. God is the only intelligence in a blank universe. The theory of Boltzmann brains makes this at least, scientifically possible. I'm not going to explain it here.

Two. God makes some company. The angels. They're okay, but a bit dull. They keep worshipping, all the time, and never think for themselves. Why would they? They know God exists because they can see him. God decides he wants to make beings with the freedom to choose their own path.

Three. This God has full control of the nothing around him. Not much to do, there's no 'space' and no 'time' yet. So he pops off the big bang and starts time and space rolling. Note: since God was there before time and space, he's not constrained by either.

Four. Does he just pop off this big bang without any sort of plan? I doubt it. Remember, he wants the creatures to have free will. He can't be obvious. So he sets physical laws for this universe, laws that allow his creatures to live but that don't, in themselves, prove he made them. The other stars, planets, galaxies, are there so we can't assume we're special in any way. It's up to each of us, individually, to make the choice. Besides, in order for the physical laws to make sense, the rest of it has to be there.

Five. Now he makes the stars, within the parameters he's set. Planets too, again not violating the laws he's set. For the sun to burn long enough, it has to be nuclear. It puts out a lot of radiation. The Earth has to be pretty close in order to be warm enough, but needs a magnetic field to deflect the radiation. In order to have a magnetic field, it has to have a molten core, but that means earthquakes, volcanoes etc. will happen. Can't be helped. God has to hide behind the physical laws because if he proves his existence, there's no longer any point to what he's doing.

Six. Water, land, plants, animals, birds, and finally man. At first, God treats Adam and Eve like pets but he knows they're going to disobey him. He made them that way, and made the tree of knowledge to give them a reason to be naughty. Once they eat from it, he makes a show of being quite miffed and sends them into the world. As intended from the outset.

See, he can't prove his existence but he has to give them a start. A few clues so they know he's there, but never enough to prove it. Adam and Eve saw God, but nobody else did. My mother claimed to have seen a UFO. Do I believe her, or do I think she was mistaken? So it was with the later humans. Early ones (according to the Bible) spoke directly with the Big Fella, but later ones did not. Denied the experience, they had to choose whether to believe or not.

Seven. About now, some of the angels are feeling a bit left out of things. They decide to take a closer look at these new beings and find that some are a bit of all right. A few glasses of communion wine later and there are half-breeds--Nephilim--around.

Eight. God says 'Oi! What are you doing?' and boots the offenders out. They hang around Earth, resentful, spotty and wearing hoodies and cause trouble wherever they can.

Fast forward to today.

God can't interfere in tsunamis, hurricanes and floods because to do so, he'd have to prove his existence. That would ruin the whole point of the experiment. I think in scientific terms so my thoughts come out that way. Once an experiment is set up and running, interfering in it will nullify the result. The next assumption is that God is thinking that way too. He might not be happy with how it's going but if he interferes, the whole thing is ruined.

On the basis of the assumptions made within this rambling thought experiment, God set up mankind with the choice to believe in him or not. That's the experimental hypothesis: Left to themselves, man will reach the conclusion that there must be a creator and that in order to achieve peace, they must let him run things. If said creator shows up, the experiment is over.

The Inquisition, world wars, the Holocaust, fundamentalist terrorists of all types, must have had him gnashing his teeth in frustration. He could not stop it, because to do so would destroy free choice and therefore terminate his experiment with the hypothesis untested.

On the other hand, God equally cannot cure the sick, save people from disaster, respond to prayer or find you that parking space when you need it. Non-interference means non-interference. No exceptions. In an experiment, the experimenter can't say 'Oh, I'll just tweak this little bit. It won't matter.'

Yes it will. Butterflies and gales come to mind.

If God exists, and (for the reasons outlined) can't interfere to save thousands from major disasters, then he can't interfere to perform any miracle, no matter how small. He has given the clues already. The experiment is in progress. Now he has no option but to watch and see how it turns out.

I guess if there's a moral to all this, it must be that whether there's a God or not, we're on our own.

At least for the duration of the experiment.

If you're paranoid, we're watching you.

No, it isn't real. Just in case you were wondering.

It's cruel but very, very funny.

Cameras and infrared. 2 – Digital.

First of all, the only serious problem I have with digital cameras is the ease with which their photos can be manipulated. Fakery is far too easy with these cameras. Using a digital image as ‘proof’ is going to be very difficult indeed. They do have some very useful aspects though, and that does not include the 'orbs' so championed by those who should know better.

Digital cameras see into the infrared. The easy way to prove this to yourself is to take a TV remote, the kind with a red window or visible LED, point it at your face and press a button. You’ll see nothing.

Now, aim it at a digital camera, watch the screen and press a button. You’ll see the remote light up. It’s infrared, and the camera can see it.

You’re probably wondering, then, why you can see it through the camera if it’s infrared, and your eyes can’t see infrared? The screen you’re looking at can’t display infrared either.

The camera’s sensor reacts to light. Visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, all of it. It sees the infrared as light, which activates pixels, which send the information ‘I have seen the light’ to the processor, which then transfers that image of light to the right bit of the screen. The processor simply forms an image based on what the pixels tell it, and since the screen works only in visible light images, it translates the infrared image sent by the sensor into a visible-light equivalent on the screen.

This works best on a monochrome setting because there’s no ‘colour’ in infrared or ultraviolet. They are outside our visible range so we can’t assign them ‘red’ and ‘blue’, they just show up as ‘light’. That’s why it works best as a greyscale image.

Because of this sensitivity to infrared, the optics in digital cameras include a filter to block most of it. It doesn’t block all of it—and the degree of infrared-blocking varies immensely between cameras—but it blocks enough so the infrared image doesn’t interfere with the visible-light image. There are two ways around this.

One is to fit an infrared filter, which looks totally opaque because it blocks all visible light. Only infrared gets though. Set the camera to monochrome (black and white) and look through the filter. You’ll need a camera capable of high ASA (ISO) settings and/or able to operate at slow shutter speeds. You’re also best to have a tripod for this, even though you’ll be shooting in daylight.

At night, where there’s little or no visible light around, you don’t even need the filter. You will probably still need the tripod. I can get away with handheld using a Sony DSC-H5 but even so, most shots are blurred. A tripod is best.

This scores over the use of infrared film in several important respects.

-You don’t have to pay for film so even if nine out of ten shots are rubbish, it’s cost nothing.

-There’s no film to keep cool. Just slot in the filter and you’re in business.

-You don’t have to use up a whole series of shots in one session. You can alternate infrared and normal shots, which means you can take photos of the same scene in both normal and infrared within seconds of each other.

-Best of all, when you look at the camera’s viewscreen you can see what the camera sees. That’s not possible with film. The exception is night photography where you might have trouble seeing the screen. Even so, that’s no worse than the film option.


The downside, as always, is that it’s easy to produce a fake so whatever you find will be hard to use as proof. All the same, you have a good chance of capturing images that you might miss with film, not least because you can shoot away without worrying about film costs. Just remember these cameras have no ‘manual’ setting. If the battery runs out, the camera won’t work at all so always have spares.

Infrared photos taken with these cameras can be grainy, because of the need for a high ASA setting. The DSC-H5 will go to 1000ASA but it’s seriously grainy at that setting. It does let you capture a scene you wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, even if it isn’t the best photo in the world.

That’s another thing about digital. If you load your camera with 400ASA film, then you’re stuck with that until the end of the roll. A digital camera can be set to 100ASA for one shot, then to 800ASA for the next. It’s far less restrictive.

So what kind of images can you expect? Well, here are some shots of an old shed beside the railway line, close to that old cottage I’ve been looking at.

This is it in daylight, in colour. It's just a shed:

Daylight, monochrome. It’s easier to compare with the infrared images this way.


Here it is again in daylight with an infrared filter. These photos were taken at different times (well, duh!) and from different angles, but they are used here as examples and not a scientific study of a shed:
Vegetation reflects infrared so appears bright. The blue sky isn't emitting much infrared so it looks dark. If ghosts are related to infrared radiation in any way, they would be expected to show up in such images. Not necessarily as perfectly-formed images of people, but at least as recognisable outlines, preferably of the right height and shape.

And again at night, without the filter – first, distant and enlarged:

It's very grainy because there was almost no visible light available. What the camera is picking up here is infrared, and there wasn't too much of that available either. The 'streak' in the top left corner is a twig. There was a nearby bush in shot.

Night, no filter, closer than before and therefore less grainy:

The one good thing about grainy images is that they're harder to add fakes to. Matching the 'grain' would take considerable skill and a lot of time, and fakers aren't likely to go that far. You could enlarge these and look at the overall grain and work out whether I'd added something. I haven't. What you see are the photos I took. Feel free to enlarge them and check.

Infrared images are never going to be perfect. The blocking filter in the camera's optics is a sticking point. I did read an article about how to take those out, and even took apart a couple of old video cameras to try it. I discovered that my skills did not extend to reassembling those optics. It's not a good idea to try that with your best cameras - the old ones I used for that experiment are now scrap.

All the same, if you want to try infrared, the cheapest and easiest place to start is with a digital camera and an infrared filter. Results vary between cameras, so you'll want to try out a few before spending a lot of cash. Get the filter first and ask your friends to loan you their cameras for a moment.

Oh, and make sure you buy one that a) has a monochrome setting and b) has the ability to accept filters. Not all of them do this!

It works with video cameras too.

Insults for the common good.

I insulted someone today.

'What?' I hear you cry. 'You, Romulus? Never!'

It was for her own good. It was like this...

Browsing among the gadgetry in a local supermarket, I stepped back and collided with a trolley, which had magically appeared directly behind me. The only other person in the aisle was a woman who had parked the trolley a foot behind me while she wandered along the shelves. She glared at me for having the temerity to shove her trolley out of my way. It was quite a glare, one that would make a hamster proud, so I responded with one of my own.

Her face contorted, with sloth-like speed, into an expression I can only describe as 'startled sheep'. I kept my voice low and measured, so as not to tax her intellect.

"Tell me," I said, "are you a professional idiot or is it just a hobby? If it's a hobby, you really should consider turning pro."

"Huh?" was her considered response. I could imagine neurons nudging each other into wakefulness within her brain. Eventually she formed a sentence. "What did you say?"

"Can't you remember? It was only a few seconds ago. Cast your mind back and see if you can find it." I held out little hope.

I marvelled at the Neanderthal appearance she achieved while thinking. It was most impressive but I feared she might blow a gasket, so I put her out of her misery.

"I was just saying, you have a natural talent that you should consider nuturing. I honestly believe you could reach Olympic standards."

Have you ever seen a face trying to smile and frown at the same time? It's hard to describe but well worth seeing. Anyway, since there was no prospect of conversation, I left her to her thoughts. I wonder if she'll wake up in the middle of the night, a week or so from now, and shout, "Hey! He called me an idiot!"

These people are real. It's too easy to forget, insulated in the world of academia where almost everyone you talk to has a doctorate in something, that the average IQ is 100. It's not a coincidence, IQ tests are set up so that 100 reflects an average score. If you hobnob with academics, you're unlikely to be speaking to anyone below 120 - and that includes technical staff. Heck, the porters and cleaners are smarter than average in that environment.

Half of the population have IQ's below 100. Consider that for a moment. Entry to Mensa requires (I think) a minimum 140, and they say that represents the top 2%. Assuming a normal distribution, the bottom 2% are below 60, which leaves 48% of the population between 60 and 100.

These people can vote. They can also be manipulated and bamboozled with ease. Heck, I've known several academics you can reduce to a gibbering heap with conversation as your only weapon.

Politicians know this too. They know that whatever sleaze and scandal they're caught at now, by election day it'll be forgotten. It's forgotten by the time the next edition of the paper hits the shelves.

Politicians know how easy it is to deflect most people's attention, which is why we're treated to reams of garbage about 'celebrities' who have never actually done a damn thing in their lives. Someone coined the phrase 'famous for being famous', can't recall who said it but there are many in that category. Headline fodder.

I saw an issue of 'the Sun', a popular tabloid paper, during the alleged fuel crisis (it came to naught, just another deflection). War in Iraq and Afghanistan, stabbings proliferating in the streets, an imminent shortage of petrol, forthcoming local elections, which took the front page?

None of them. The front page story concerned a comedian who had slightly miffed a footballer with a thoughtless comment at a private function. Seriously. That was front page news.

No wonder most people's heads have nothing in them. Read their minds? Not a problem, it's composed of one-syllable words in large print. Telepathy can never be proved with these people as subjects because they have no thoughts to transfer. They believe what they're told, but you can tell them the opposite tomorrow and they'll believe that instead. Their minds have been erased by soap operas and bland news. Nothing is retained. They complain that prices have gone up, but ask what the price was yesterday and they can't remember. Their brains have shut down.

If insulting them gets those brains to work again, even for a short while, it's worth it.

It's a lot of fun, too.

Cameras and infrared. 1 - Film

I go on about this a lot, but it’s important. Standard photographic film reacts to a similar range of wavelengths as the eye. It does pick up more ultraviolet than we can, which is what causes that overall ‘haze’ on photos taken in bright sunlight. Fortunately UV doesn’t travel well through glass so the lens stops most of it. You can clear the problem with a simple UV filter, which is a good idea anyway. They are cheap, and if your camera takes a head-on knock, you’ll find it much cheaper to replace a UV filter than a scratched lens.

So all my cameras have UV filters.

Infrared is a whole different game. If you want to take photos in the infrared on film, you have to buy special infrared film. Note that you don’t need a special camera, just special film BUT…

…some camera backs reflect infrared and will mess up your photos. Watch for that.

Using infrared film is a lot of fuss, even if you can find a shop that sells it. There are no local suppliers where I live now and I won’t buy it by post. There are some things you have to know about that film before you hand over your cash.

It has to be stored cold. If you ask for it, and it doesn’t come out of a fridge, don’t buy it. Infrared film is very heat sensitive. It can be fogged before it ever goes in a camera if it’s not properly stored. If you get some, rush home and keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Now comes the interesting part. The film must be stored cold, but if you put cold film in a warm camera you’ll get condensation on the film. So you need to bring it up to ambient temperature before loading it.

Right. Your camera is loaded with infrared film. Now you need an infrared filter, which will block all visible light. This means that when you look through the viewfinder, you see nothing. Okay, slide the filter out of the way, frame and focus the shot, slide the filter back and shoot, right? Wrong.

Infrared light does not focus in the same place as visible light. If you have a good SLR camera, you’ll notice every lens has a red dot or mark, a little to the left of the centre mark. Focus your shot, look at the lens and the centre mark will tell you the focusing distance. Move that to align with the red dot, and you’re focused for infrared.

Okay. Now you can slide that filter back into place and take the shot. Assuming whatever you were shooting at is still around. Did I mention you should do all this on a tripod? Well, you should.

Let’s say you’ve been through that ten times and taken ten shots. Your film isn’t finished but there’s nothing else to interest you. Pack up and go home, leave the film in place and try for more tomorrow?

Nope. That film has to be stored cold, remember. You MUST finish it now. Use the whole film, rewind, take it out of the camera and put it back in its cool-box. When you get home, keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to process it.

If you’re taking it to be processed, find a specialist. Don’t fall for ‘Oh, we can do that. It’s just like black and white film’. Not quite. The processor needs to keep it in the fridge. If they don’t they’ve ruined it.

Whether you process yourself or have someone do it—no safelight. When developing film, usually you can have a very dim red light on, just enough to see what you’re doing. Not with infrared. Total darkness, or you’re screwed.

So, to summarise:

Infrared film must be kept cold, warmed up to use, used all in one session and then kept cold again.

You can’t see through the filter, and if you focus with the filter out of the way, it’ll be wrong.

If any internal component of the camera reflects infrared you’re screwed. If you have one of those that uses an infrared light and sensor to track the frame number, you’re totally screwed.

Developing it requires an ability to work without sight. No, you can’t use infrared night-vision goggles. Obviously.

Infrared film is expensive and extremely difficult to use. I gave up on it, because you’d need to take many, many shots to have a chance of getting a seriously good ghost photo, and even then it’s just too easy to ruin the film. Plus, setting up the shot takes so long that whatever you were aimed at will have wandered off. Too much expense, too much trouble, for too little return. Not worth the bother.

Then along came digital. They see infrared all the time, and you can even frame a shot through a filter. I’ll deal with them next.

The orb that wasn’t (aren’t they all?).

One of the pictures I took of the ruined cottage showed something a little odd. To the right, just above the wall, is what appears to be an orb. What’s odd is that this is in broad daylight, no flash, no filter and no reason to see illuminated dust. Further, the orb appears to be distant, behind a fence post. I noticed nothing at the time.

Here it is enlarged.

Well, it’s definitely behind the fence post. It’s bright and circular. What might it be? Will I have to recant all I’ve said about orbs in the past? Noticing some features within the disc, I enlarged it further. Ignore the 'product placement'. I didn't put that there.

Here we see the mystic symbol ‘60’ within the orb’s disc.

That’s right, it’s a speed limit sign for the railway that runs behind the fence.

These signs are reflective but you don’t notice that in daylight. Because they reflect wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, into the infrared and ultraviolet, the digital camera does notice.

Such infrared/ultraviolet reflections are a common cause of ‘lights that weren’t there when the photo was taken’. They were there. Human eyes just can’t see them. Digital cameras see infrared and ultraviolet and not only at night. They see these wavelengths all the time. Normally, the intensity of light in a daylight shot overrides any image due to infrared, but once in a while a highly IR/UV-reflective surface will crop up, and the camera will show something you didn’t see.

So if a ghost is visible in the infrared, you won’t see them but your camera will. In daylight, that won’t be easy because they’d have to be intensely infrared to even show as an outline on the image. At night, or with an infrared filter by day, the image would show up better.

This wasn’t a ghost, it was a tin disc on a stick, but it illustrates the principle. Don’t give up looking just because the sun’s come up. Your camera is still able to see things you can’t.

At least I can still say with confidence that orbs are bunk.

Intermission.

I'm working on a comparison of film and digital cameras which is turning into more of a book chapter than a blog post. I'll have to seriously abridge it for use here, so it'll be a while yet.

In the interests of procrastination, I looked through some online videos (no, not that kind) and found that the world is a more depressingly stupid place than even I had imagined.

This woman has a remarkably poor grasp of oratory skills, considering she is a teacher. She also has an artificial smile that is responsible for much teeth-grinding. Her appearance on the internet is a dentist's dream.

However, she makes some valid points once you get past her insistence that religion is the cure for all the world's ills. History tells us it's the cause of most of them but in a Freudian slip she admits that history should be deleted. Anyway, what she says about education is true. The current political oafs who run this country are so incompetent and corrupt that our once excellent education system is now in tatters.

I don't lecture to University students these days but when I did, I was appalled at how many of them were incapable of spelling simple words or of adding up a few numbers without a calculator. I taught as a lecturer for thirteen years. Those studying for HND at the start of those years had a better grasp of grammar, spelling and simple mathematics than those studying for postgraduate qualifications in the latter years. It's been three years since I last taught. I wonder if they still use words, or are they answering exam questions with cave paintings now?

This woman, this teacher, tells us why. Just don't look at her for too long or you'll hit the screen with something.

My favourite was the part where she describes attempting to teach children computing. The thing about computers is that they are absolutely literal.

If you can't spell it, the computer can't find it. In fifty years the Internet will be utterly useless because nobody will be able to spell any of the keywords stored on it.

Reminds me of an advert for a Beavis and Butthead game - 'a game starring two guys who can't even spell CD'.

There are far more than two now.

Wall to wall stupid.

Reading the site in the last post, I came across an article on education and how, nowadays, there really isn't any. It reminded me of a few things.

One.

When I was at school, the acceleration due to gravity was 9.8 metres per second per second. We had no calculators. Nowadays, I hear that children (with calculators but apparently without the capacity for thought) are taught that the value is 10 because 'it makes the sums easier'.

Take heart then. You have not gained weight. Your mass is the same but gravity has increased so you only appear to be heavier. Unfortunately the stupidity of the upcoming generation is not illusion.

Two.

A young shop assistant had trouble with her till and found it difficult to add up the items I had presented her with. I told her the total. She ignored me. When she finally made her till work and saw the total, her eyes widened so far I thought they might drop out.

She said 'How did you do that?'

I picked up my shopping and said 'By not being an idiot' and left the shop. I've never been back.

Three.

There is a Posh School in the town. The pupils are clearly taught the rudiments of arrogance, pomposity and self-importance since they have no concept of 'queue'. Waiting at the bus stop, I watched these hideous little bastards arrive and walk to the front of the queue where they congregated so as to block the pavement. I left the stop and walked the half-mile or so to the stop before this one, so I was seated and scowling when the uniformed uneducated swarmed aboard. One day they will all wear suits that are currently empty. They'll still be empty when these mindless idiots put them on.

Four.

While I'm on the subject of the weakness of our 'hard-man' young, I have noticed that the tougher they pretend to be, the more likely they are to take the bus for any distance more than ten yards. I have watched them ride over distances for which I, a considerably older individual, would not even consider using any transport other than legs. In fact, in many cases they could have walked to their destinations in less time than it took to wait for the bus. Pathetic. For the record, the distance I travel on the bus is 25 miles. It would take most of the day to walk there but I can still do it.

Five.

One more bus anecdote. Two stops from my usual disembarking point, I noticed a horde of schoolchildren waiting as the bus approached. Now, I don't like crowded buses and as it meant only a half-mile or so more to walk, I decided to get off here. The bus stopped. The door opened.

I was faced with a sea of faces that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that British education has absolutely no effect whatsoever. Wall to wall stupid. None seemed to grasp the (to me, at least) simple premise that if they moved out of the way, I could get off the bus and they could get on. It's not complicated, surely? Yet their atrophied minds could not grasp it. Eyes so blank you could write on them. Mouths hanging open like sideshow targets. It was tempting but I had nothing vile to throw.

I barged through them. One tried to trip me. His leg will heal in time, and he might have learned that not all adults are teachers, and therefore not all adults are worried about getting sacked if they hurt these wastes of space. As self-employed, only I can sack me and in my business, the penalty for putting a little reality into the life of a terminally cosseted weakling is to be forced to drink whisky and smoke a cigar. I have already done my penance. See, an adult leg is a little bit more powerful than a child's. Especially when you compare an adult who walks, with a child who takes the bus for a half-mile. An adult who cares to see the world rather than wander through in a daze can spot a trip attempt coming, and it just takes a small raising of the foot for a toecap to connect with an ankle. Pure accident, of course.

When I was a child, we damaged ourselves and each other in play. We shrugged it off and kept playing. Fights meant black eyes at the least. I recall many with closed-up eyes who just used the other one for a few weeks until it healed. I have not seen a child with so much as a bruise in many years. These children are not equipped to survive. They don't know what it's like to be hurt and they don't know how to keep going and cope with it when they are. I despise them, it's true, but I also recognise that it's not their fault. The PC world we live in has bubble-wrapped them. They think they are invincible because they've never been hurt. They think they never will be.

They are wrong. It will happen and they won't be able to deal with it when it does. Still, in our wonderful new world, they'll always be able to blame someone else for their failures.

I will never take a job as a teacher.

Better than me.

Hard to believe, I know, but there is someone out there who puts the arguments against those smug pustules that comprise the 'Politically Correct' movement more succintly that I ever could.
Here he is.

There's a lot on that site. It'll take time to read.

For those outside the UK, the 'Grauniad' is a reference to a UK newspaper called 'the Guardian', famous for its PC bleating and so politically correct they apparently employ a typesetter who can't spell.

The voices made me do it.

I’m in two minds about schizophrenia.

Okay, that was a cheap shot, but it’s true all the same. I’ve been in two minds about the subject for a long time. What sparked me off again was this New Scientist article.

Studies are showing links between clustered abnormal events in human society (such as spates of suicides) and variations in the Earth’s magnetic fields. The results so far suggest there might be a link.

There are animals, particularly birds, which use the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation. There is, so far, nothing to suggest that humans can detect magnetic fields. However, that’s not to say we can’t – it simply means there is no evidence of a conscious detection of magnetic fields by humans. I’ve never come across anyone who could close their eyes, hold out their hands and tell when there’s a magnet close by. But then, do birds use their magnetic sense consciously? Do they think ‘Well, that way is magnetic north so I have to fly at fifteen degrees to that line,’ or is it unconscious? Does it just ‘feel like the right way to go’? I suspect the latter.

Perhaps the link between odd behaviour and magnetism is spurious. Perhaps it is real. Time, and accumulated studies, will tell.

It brought back to me just how little we really know about the human mind. Oh, sceptics will come along and say ‘We know an awful lot, and things like this can’t happen’ but they, strangely enough, have never studied the subject. They are right, in a way. We do know an awful lot. But there’s far more unknown than known. There is no sense in saying ‘can’t happen’ without looking in to the matter. That’s not science.

Science does not say ‘That can never happen’. Science gives an answer along the lines of ‘We tested it hundreds of times, and it didn’t happen once. So it’s unlikely to happen in the future’. The statements sound similar but there’s a world of difference between them.

Anyway, back to the schizophrenia. It’s a badly misused and wildly misdiagnosed illness, to the extent that some psychiatrists have proposed scrapping the term altogether. So many symptoms get lumped in there that ‘schizophrenia’ might be a suite of disorders rather than just the one. But that’s not my problem.

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia, as it stands, is hearing disembodied or internal voices. The cure is, of course, drugs to stop the voices.

Take the drugs, the voices stop. Does that prove the voices weren’t real?

Scientifically, no it does not. It proves the drug stopped the patient hearing those voices. If you want to call me names (crank, nutcase and looney are favourites) and I choose to close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears, then I’ve ‘cured’ the voice that’s calling me names. I can’t see you. I can’t hear you. Ergo, by exactly the same logic, you no longer exist. Bye now.

Take the other point of view, that of the patient. Voices come from the air or inside their head. They have no idea who or what is speaking. Naturally, they’re terrified and will behave erratically. They might give in and do what the voices urge them to do—harm themselves or others, behave in a violent or inappropriate manner in public or whatever. They might start answering the voices, muttering to themselves and carrying on a conversation.

If that happened to you, you’d assume you’d cracked up and you might seek medical help. They’ll give you drugs and the voices will stop. Again, does that prove the voices weren’t real? Again, no. It proves the drug worked to stop the voices coming through. The result says nothing about the reality or otherwise of the voices. It just means they’ve gone. That might be good enough, if you’re the one hearing them.

I’ve never seen a real case of ‘spirit possession’ and I find it hard to believe that an invading spirit could totally subjugate the body’s current resident. I’m not saying it can’t happen. Just that I don’t, at the moment, think it likely.

However, I’ve said many times that ghosts can’t physically hurt anyone. They have no solid form so they can’t whack you. If we discount possession for the moment, that leaves a malicious spirit one main weapon. Persuasion.

They can, if they can make you hear them, nag and nag and nag until you do what they want just to stop them yakking. It won’t stop them, because just like living bullies, once they’ve scored a point they keep on going.

There are fake mediums and there are real ones. The fakes know they are fakes. The real ones don’t always know they are real. Just because someone sees and/or hears ghosts does not mean they will immediately think ‘Hey, I’m a medium’. Most likely they will think ‘I’m going mad’.

A malicious spirit can exploit this confusion and set to work to drive the hapless victim to terrible and ridiculous acts. Naturally they can only do this to those who can hear them but who don’t know what they are hearing.

So, are the drugs curing an imaginary voice, or are they blocking the reception of a real voice? Currently, there’s no way to tell unless the voice pestering one patient leaves when that patient is ‘cured’ and produces exactly the same effect in someone else. Easy? Nope. Most such patients report much the same sort of voices, telling them much the same sort of thing anyway.

Doesn’t that support the idea that these might be real spirit voices? Well, not exactly, because the impulses (attack, self-harm etc) might come from some basic corner of the primitive part of our minds. It might be the same for everyone, and the patients are imagining the voices to rationalise their actions.

It might be that the voices heard by such patients are real spirit voices. It might be that the voices are imaginary. It might be that some are one kind, some another. It might be an entirely different explanation altogether. There is, at present, no clear method of differentiating. The drugs stop the voices, that’s all we know. We’re not even sure how the drugs work at a neuronal level.

So I’m still in two minds about schizophrenia, but perhaps studies like the one mentioned above will help with that. One day.

Maths and logic and clever manipulation.

1 UK gallon = 4.54609 litres

1 US (liquid) gallon = 3.785411784 litres.

Currently, 1 UK pound = 1.98 US dollar.

The price of one litre of petrol in the UK is just over a pound. Call it two dollars a litre for simplicity and you can find out why I use the bus more often than my car.

Currently, there is a refinery where the employees are threatening to strike. One refinery, not all of them. Something about cuts to the pension plan – I don’t work there so I don’t know the details. The strike will be for two days, but the refinery will have to shut down and it takes a month to get it running again. Let’s call a month 30 days to keep the sums easy.

This refinery processes 200,000 barrels a day. A barrel is currently over 100 dollars. That’s 20,000,000 dollars a day, or 600,000,000 dollars for the month in lost money for the refinery, over a two day strike.

I wonder how much they save by cutting the worker’s pension plan? More than six hundred million dollars (three hundred million pounds)? Somehow I doubt that. So why is it happening?

People are queuing at petrol stations all over the place, blank eyed and chanting ‘Must…fill…car’. Idiots. Get rid of your ten-miles-per-gallon moron-mobiles and buy something that works more efficiently. My car isn’t small. It’s an estate (station wagon to the rebel colonists) so I can carry loads of junk. It still gets over 40 miles to the gallon. Nobody in the UK needs a car capable of climbing Everest. But that’s a different tirade.

Several petrol stations are out of petrol already. The queues are something to see, all those idling engines working to empty fuel tanks just so they can be refilled at a pound a litre.

Farmer’s fuel suppliers have introduced rationing. They claim they are running short already. Eh? The strike has yet to materialise and it might yet be called off. The refinery isn’t closed, so there’s been no interruption in supply. There can’t be a shortage until the supply stops, since farmers will only get what these companies are willing to sell them.

Right, that’s the maths. The strike will cost the refinery around six hundred million dollars, far more than they could possibly save on a cut in the pension scheme. People are causing their own short-term shortages by panic buying, but that can’t apply to the farm supplies because they are controlled by the suppliers. Yet they claim to be running out before the shutdown happens.

Where’s the logic? There isn’t any.

Unless it’s a con trick. Watch those fuel prices rise in the coming weeks.

Burn the witch!

The Witchfinder must be chuckling in whatever afterlife he went to.

A change in UK law means that psychics can be prosecuted for claiming to be psychic. The onus is no longer on the prosecutor to show that they are a fake, the onus is now on the accused to prove that they are genuine. Somewhat of a departure from the 'innocent until proven guilty' format we are used to here.

Strangely, this does not mean that the Pope will have to prove he really does represent God, nor that imams will have to prove the reality of Allah before they are allowed to preach, nor that physicists will have to prove the Higgs boson exists before spending vast sums of taxpayer's money to look for it, nor that politicians will have to prove they have a brain before taking office.

No, these laws are set up specifically to prevent psychics claiming to be psychic. Well, there are an awful lot of frauds out there who should be dealt with in the most severe way possible, but among the chaff there might yet be some wheat.

Can we find it? Well, let's see. Under the new laws, if you want to express them with utter pedantry, if I were to post a photo here that I claimed showed a ghost, you could bring a prosecution against me. It won't get too far because I don't ask for money but by the letter of the law, I'd be claiming a psychic phenomenon and therefore liable to be hauled into court. The case might fail but the damage to credibility will already be done. Score one to the witchfinders.

You won't have to prove I faked the photo. I'd have to prove I didn't. Proving a fake can be done. Proving not-a-fake is impossible because it will always come back to 'He could have done it by some means we didn't detect'. The same is true of any psychic phenomenon. A magician can replicate it, so the psychic must have done it the same way. Nobody can see him do it because he's so quick, but that's how he did it allright. We just didn't spot it.

As with the Inquisition, as with the Witchfinders, once accused you are guilty by default. There is no way to win such a case. There never was.

Prepare for malicious prosecutions brought against anyone the sceptics don't like. Ladies, get rid of any black cats you might own and concrete over that herb garden now. For God's sake, don't cackle or you're done for.

And if you haven't read up on the 1600's, best do so now. We're just about to go back there.

There might even be a civil war. Plague, anyone?

Science and the Holy Books.

I stand in the middle ground on this, which means I get cat-calls from both sides. I’m quite used to choruses of ‘yah boo hiss resign’ so chorus away. I’ve had plenty of practice at acidic response.

See, I don’t care. I don’t care whether the air I breathe was put here by God, by trees, by bacteria, by algae, or whether it was farted over the planet by a passing space goblin. It’s there. I can breathe it. That’s enough for me. Where it all came from is the domain of physicists, chemists, botanists etc. I can’t study every scientific discipline and won’t try.

I don’t care whether there’s a God or not. If I do get to meet him one day, I have a few remarks to make about the logic of his creation and he won’t like it. If there isn’t one I’ll just have to find someone else to shout at. Either way, it doesn’t matter to me.

By now, there are religious folk with their fingers digging into the arms of their chairs. Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself. Those who are praying for me, stop it. It won’t help. Besides, he’s not going to let me die any time soon. I’m someone he can do without meeting just yet.

This is not to say I’m a Dawkinsite antireligious fanatic either. Those scientists are denying the existence of something because they just don’t want it to be so. They have done zero research on this subject and there’s no point anyway. Science cannot disprove the existence of God. Never could, and will never be able to. It’s a subject science should leave alone because it simply cannot be studied using the scientific way.

Over on Tom Sheepandgoats’ blog, he’s having a go at evolution, using the famous Piltdown Man fake as an example. True, the scientists involved should have known better. There was nothing to suggest any colonisation of the British Isles at the time Piltdown Man was supposed to be around. They should have smelled a rat straight away, but they didn’t. Or maybe they did but decided to go with it. Prestige is a powerful thing, and has led many a sensible man astray, both in science and religion.

Now, evolution happens. Has happened and is still happening. Can’t be helped, there it is. The development of many animals can be traced back through the fossil record – some well, some not so well. Except one.

Us.

All those early hominids, it turns out, were other species. As far as I’m aware (and I state now that evolution isn’t my field of research), the human species has not so far been definitively linked to a specific pre-human ancestor.

Science will say “Just because we haven’t found it yet, doesn’t mean it’s not there”.

True. But why apply that argument to one unknown and the opposite to another? Is that science?

Religion will say “God did it”.

Well, science can’t prove he didn’t at the moment, but science will continue to look for the link.

This is the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. The term comes from science and is meant as a derisory comment on the ‘God did it’ statement – any gaps in scientific knowledge ‘must have been God’ by religious argument. Religion can’t prove God did it.

BUT science can’t prove he didn’t.

In that case, both arguments must be equally valid until one is disproved. Some scientists are purple-faced by now, I’m sure, and some are laughing and saying ‘Oh yes, the flying spaghetti monster did it’.

A ridiculous extension of the argument, but from which side? Is the flying spaghetti monster theory less valid than the other two?

Well, from the correct, strictly impersonal view of science, all theories are valid until they are knocked out one by one, or one is proven (PROVEN, not preferred) to be correct. You can just as well say ‘Aliens put us here’ or ‘We spontaneously generated from dust-bunnies’ or ‘Humans were the fruit of the Idiot Tree’ (certainly a viable argument in some cases).

Some theories can be disproven in minutes, of course, but when faced with an unknown then all theories that cannot be immediately discarded must be considered. In science, it’s not good enough to say ‘I prefer my theory so I’m just going to deride the other guy’s so mine gets accepted by default’. Religious fundamentalism does exactly this. So does scientific fundamentalism.

If science can prove beyond all doubt that humans evolved from a specific ancestor, does that utterly discredit religion? Does it prove there is no God? Does it really? How?

Evolution doesn’t prove there is no God. Neither does the Big Bang. Neither do all those dinosaur skeletons, carbon dating, the fact the human eye is wired the wrong way round and squid have better ones. Science has proved, to my satisfaction at least, that the Earth is far older than six thousand years. Does that prove there’s no God? Well, no. It proves that whoever worked out the biblical timeline wasn’t right. Or maybe he wasn't so wrong. It only goes back as far as Adam, remember, and humans are recent. He’s still out, but not ‘age of the Earth’ out. Only ‘first appearance of modern humans’ out and that’s not nearly so bad when you consider all he had to work with was one book.

If there are any still out there praying for my immortal soul, stop it now or when I die I’ll come visit and you don’t want that. Those who think I work for Satan can be assured that I don’t care about him either. He’s not all he’s cracked up to be, even if he exists.

Why doesn’t evolution disprove God? Well, the key is in the ‘intelligent designer’ label. A really intelligent designer would realise that his creations will have to live in wildly different and changing environments. They have to get through an Ice Age or two. They have to live in permanent snow, and in baking desert. They have to be able to adapt. So he’d give all his animals the chance to change, to develop, to keep life going in whatever way they can. He would allow, no, he would encourage evolution. So science can prove evolution, but religion can still claim ‘God did it’, even without the gap.

Humans, though? Did we appear here as we are now, unchanging in any serious way since the first human set foot on Earthly soil and promptly stubbed his toe on a rock? Who can say? Science can’t, not yet. Religion does, but can’t prove it. Stalemate.

Humans have a habit of changing the environment to suit them rather than the other way around. Human evolution is held in check by humans. Live somewhere with no water? Well, we could do it the hard way and evolve into a water-retaining species or we could just dig a well or lay a pipe. We don’t evolve because we don’t need to. Natural selection doesn’t work on a species capable of adjusting, removing or simply ignoring the selective pressures.

It’s still stalemate on whether humans evolved from an earlier species or whether God did it. That situation might change but until it does, science should shut up and work on it. Declaring the result before getting the data does not improve scientific credibility. And remember, there’s no detailed description of Adam in the Bible. He might not have looked exactly like us. Maybe God ‘adjusted’ him too.

In the meantime, the argument is no more than ‘Oh no he didn’t’ ‘Oh yes he did’ and has no conclusion in sight. Each side tries to shout down the other in this expanded playground fight.

For now, both arguments have equal validity from a pure science standpoint because neither are proven and neither are disproven.

Shouting won’t change that. Research might.

A new one.

In the film 'Men in Black', Tommy Lee Jones gets all his weird info from the tabloid hack-rags. It's not that different in real life. Why? Well, the sensationalist papers are the most likely to print this stuff. Trouble is, they don't employ any kind of filtering so every weird tale from every weird teller gets through.

The first time I looked at this I thought 'Bah. Photoshop'. Yet reading on, it seems the photo was taken with a disposable camera and the image also appears on the negative.

There are ways around that, of course. Two slide projectors can produce a composite image, which you can then photograph. Or, a double exposure with the boy standing against a dark background. Harder to line up but not too hard.

I'd doubt the double exposure since those disposable cameras can't do that. Unless it was faulty. The two-slide-projector deal can be spotted on an original photo but not on a newspaper or Internet reproduction.

Now, I haven't seen the original and haven't even seen an image of the negative so I'll have to take that part on trust for now. Assuming, then, that there is a negative which also shows this picture, we're back to double exposure/double projector as a possible means of faking it.

Neither of those explanations work for the image reproduced here. On a negative, as on a projector screen, the light areas are the parts projected. Where it's dark, it means the light is blocked or there's little or no reflected light to photograph. In either case, it's the light areas that produce the image, not the dark ones.

So if you took a photo of the boy against a dark background, and projected it onto a screen along with the background, the boy's image would overlay the gate. He wouldn't appear to be behind it. The same would be true of a double exposure.

Looks good so far BUT... it is possible to buy devices that will take a computer generated image and put it onto a slide. Or a negative. These devices aren't rare - in fact, when I was lecturing we used them to put graphs and diagrams onto slides for teaching. That was before Powerpoint, of course. It could have been done that way.

I'm still very skeptical on this one for two reasons.

One, the photo isn't 'of' anything. It has no subject and gives the impression of being produced as a background. Okay, people often take random shots to use up the end of a film, so it could be one of those.

Two - and this is the big one - look at the alignment. Check the top of the gate against the posts surrounding the trees. The gate isn't leaning as much as it appears to be so the photo is tilted. Looking at the horizon, and especially at the houses, there's at least a five degree tilt here.

The boy is nearly upright. Unless he was leaning to his left while the photo was taken, he wasn't in that scene when it was photographed.

It looks good, but I'm tending towards a decision of 'no' for this one. I'd like to see the originals before dismissing it but on the basis of what I can see here, I'm not convinced.

Gene genies.

There's a story going around about Russian scientists who have worked out what 'junk DNA' does.

Junk DNA is what you might call moulding flash, leftovers, spares. It doesn't do anything that anyone's been able to determine. There's an awful lot of it.

These Russian scientists have 'proved' that this junk DNA does everything from telepathy to faith healing.

So why don't I believe it?

DNA doesn't actually do anything. It codes for proteins, and that's all. It's the instruction book for the cell. The proteins made from this template can be enzymes or parts of cell structures, but the DNA itself doesn't do anything.

Expecting DNA to be active on its own is just like sitting on the instruction manual for a car and expecting to go somewhere. DNA isn't active. It's the book that tells you how to build and fix the vehicle, it's not the vehicle itself.

Another reason I don't believe it is that the article is dated 2005, but none of the things it claims to have achieved have ever appeared. None of the examples of paranormal events given in the article have been shown to involve DNA. There's no logical reason to assume DNA does anything aside from determining the shape, function and various colours of your body. DNA is purely in the physical world.

Changing your DNA will not allow you to change into a werewolf. It's more likely to cause cancer. To keep the car analogy, if you take the manual out of a Ford and replace it with a manual from a Lexus, your car won't change into a Lexus. All that will happen is this: the next time you try to fix your Ford using your Lexus manual, you'll break it.

These Russians might be real scientists, I don't know. If they are, then they are proof that we still have a healthy population of mad ones.