Marchway Memoirs

Ghosts in the Amazon machine.

2012-01-26T00:14:00.003Z

I have been advised by more than one person that I should use CreateSpace to get books onto Amazon. So I have. It wasn't easy. That program is fussy enough to force me to re-do all the photographs.

The second edition is now on CreateSpace and will appear on Amazon US in a few days. Then I can look at wider distribution.

There is a free story coming up that has a dig at the fake psychics. I just need to get the formatting right. The cover is already done and looks like this:

None of those people are me. It uses my 'fiction' name as usual, to separate it from my more academically-inclined endeavours.

There'll be another post when it's ready.

What's that thing?

2012-01-16T23:47:00.000Z

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It looks like the result of some deranged cross-breeding experiment involving a guitar, a banjo, a violin and a hubcap.

He's using a bottleneck on his left hand and banjo picks on his right. It makes an impressive array of sounds but I've never seen one of these in the UK.

So what is it?

Free stories update.

2012-01-04T03:33:00.000Z

A month ago I mentioned a scheme by which I would give away free stories with adverts for other books attached. The reasoning behind this was that if I put a story into a magazine, I could expect a one-off payment of ten dollars/pounds at best. It seemed a better use of a short story to forgo that little payment and use it to advertise the books.

The end-of-year roundup seems a good time to see how it's going. A new trick in this game is the release of an unannounced free story, 'A Christmas Contract', which I put out early Christmas morning without much fanfare because I wanted to see how it would do on its own. It has not yet passed Smashwords approval and escaped into the world but that's not surprising. Smashwords' approval system is manual and there won't be anyone working over Christmas. If they were based in Scotland then judging by my own experience of the last few days, they wouldn't be sober yet. I was still at a party at 5 am on January 2nd and am only now regaining control of my fingers.

Likewise, none of the booksellers will report over this period so it's a good, quiet time to take stock.

For the Smashwords downloads, the figures for each story are now -

A Christmas Contract          129
A Little Knowledge...           229   (200)
Room Service                    404   (365)
Bernie's Bargain                 190   (163)

The figures in brackets are those from December 3rd.

The most popular is Room Service which is odd because it's the only one that doesn't have a five-star review. Once again, even though I didn't push this new story, the stats for the previous ones rose when it came out. The way these free stories work on Smashwords is that they appear in the order they arrive, so they scroll off the screens after two to three days and few people bother looking that far. A new story links to the older ones so interest is renewed until the new one scrolls away too.

I'm trying the same with an extract from 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' but it's too early to say whether that's doing any good. I see it selling on Amazon and Apple in the first edition but the second still has to get through to those sites. More on that when there's something more tangible to say. It will need another freebie soon because that one will have scrolled away by now.

The retailer downloads of free books via Smashwords up to the end of 2011 were as follows:

Barnes and Noble   305
Sony                       172

I haven't split them into individual books because that would take ages, but Room Service is definitely the most popular. If I've learned nothing else, I've learned what those readers like best.

There is small uptake on Amazon for Kindle but that's because I can't work out how to make them free on there without giving up all copyright. Free Kindle versions are on Smashwords but those who don't know about Smashwords have the Amazon minimum price of 99 cents to deal with. On Amazon, it seems 'A Little Knowledge...' is the favourite.

Reports can be intermittent and these don't include paid sales (not many as yet, but free and paid sales are reported separately by most retailers) so at this stage it's too early to tell whether the ads are having an effect. I see nothing coming via Diesel so will concentrate on those that are generating sales. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple and Sony seem most effective so far. I run the Amazon uploads directly, Apple is almost all through Lulu, Barnes and Noble through Smashwords for some and Lulu for others and Sony entirely through Smashwords.

Smashwords also distribute to Diesel and Kobo but I have no updates on those yet.

As for Jessica's Trap, no evidence of the ads producing results yet but then I started this experiment with the first free story on 25th September and given the long delays in booksellers reporting, it might be too early to be sure. Kobo and Diesel might yet have surprises in store.

I'll continue the experiment since it costs nothing, and hopefully will see some results when it's been running for six months or so.

It's probably best to wait until the end of March for the next update unless something spectacular happens in the meantime. By then I should have a better idea of how well this is working.

Now I have to fiddle around with the ePub version of Ghosthunting 2 so that Lulu can get it onto B&N and Apple. The first version is doing well there and if I can get the format right on the second, it might do well too.

I can but try.

New Year

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000Z

This one's on a timer because I'm not really here. I hope it works.

We are supposed to have some impressive Auroras over these few days because of a solar storm. Typically, it is overcast and raining here.

Anyway, have a Happy New Year and let's see if we can get a decent photo this year.

The annual Jacobite investigation.

2011-12-24T21:04:00.000Z

I don't know what the weather was like in December 1745. If it was as cold as last year, wading across that river would have been nearly impossible. If it was something similar to this evening, crossing the river would have been far less traumatic.

This year, the temperature was around 3 C (about 29 F), there was no snow, no wind beyond a light breeze and sparse cloud cover. This was both a good thing and a bad thing.

It meant that standing out there for a couple of hours wasn't a problem. However, there is not much light available for photography so a layer of snow and some low, heavy cloud would have brightened things up considerably. I won't bother putting up video, it's just a black screen. The photos are similarly dark. Next time I have a snow-free winter I'd better take along some infrared lighting.

I saw and heard nothing this time but something interesting happened. The freshly-charged batteries in my camera flashed up the 'nearly dead' warning as soon as I turned it on. Not remarkable in itself, those rechargeable batteries are capricious beasts and have been known to spontaneously die for no reason.

The battery in my watch died and stopped the watch at 4:22 pm. Freshly-charged batteries in my phone, my video camera and my backup camera all showed 'last gasp'. Having one set of batteries die at an inconvenient time would be an annoyance - having them all die at the same time is too much of a coincidence.

I saw nothing, heard nothing, the night was still, the river slow. Now I think of it, I really mean I heard nothing. No birds. No rodents in the long grass. Nothing at all. There was absolutely no sign of life.

Something happened this evening and I'm not sure what. I have a feeling I'm getting close to this one. Still haven't seen it but I am now sure I have the date, time and location right. The conditions seem better when it's a mild winter with not too much water in the river. I suppose that would be the sort of conditions that would make it feasible to mount an attack by wading across. With no snow and no clouds reflecting the town lights, it really does get very dark at that part of the river. Again, that's what you need to sneak up on an enemy. Unfortunately it's exactly what you don't need if you're trying to take photographs!

I have not yet examined the photos in detail. Here are a couple with the brightness increased but be aware that increasing brightness can increase pixellation and that risks forming shapes that weren't really there. The pictures should enlarge if you click them. Feel free to download them and see if you spot anything.

Even with the brightness increased there's not much to see. I'm going to have to go against my own advice next year and make use of infrared.lighting. Bright lighting would just attract gawpers.

I feel as if this investigation took a step forward tonight. Not a big step, but in the right direction.

With luck, it will be mild again next year.

The Turin Shroud - does it matter?

2011-12-20T22:30:00.001Z

Oh yes it is!

Oh no it isn't!

Oh yes it is!

The pantomime surrounding the Turin Shroud continues with the news that the image can only have been produced by a blast of intense short-wave light. Something that only modern equipment could achieve. No fifteenth-century faker could have done it.

So it's real?

The answer is, and probably always will be, maybe.

Nobody has tested the actual image on the real shroud. The Vatican will not allow it and is never likely to. Not because 'they are scared' but because they consider it a holy relic and don't want scientists poking holes in it. So it has now been proven that no ancient faker could have made the image using short-wave light, but maybe that's not how it was made. It could be made that way but that doesn't prove it was.

There was an attempt to carbon-date the shroud using a little bit of cloth from one corner. Unfortunately the shroud was fire-damaged at some point in its history (there are burn marks still) and was repaired with less ancient cloth. So the carbon-date can't be considered reliable.

At the moment, nobody knows the how, where, when or who of this artefact. It is entirely possible that nobody ever will. I don't think it matters anyway.

Let's suppose that someone finds definite proof that the image was of an actual crucified corpse, that it dates from around 35 AD, and that there is no known explanation for the image that would fit with any technique known to have been available at that time. Would that prove that it is the image of Christ?

No.

It would only prove that it was the image of someone crucified at roughly the time Christ was said to have been crucified. The Romans were big on crucifixion. Every Saturday night they hit the town, drank wine, ate bread, impregnated women and crucified some random men. So even if we knew the time, the place and date, that still leaves hundreds, possibly thousands of victims who could be the one imprinted on that sheet.

Remember, if we don't know how it was done, the possibility remains that some grieving relatives used a technique that is lost now, and that the image isn't Christ at all but someone who once called Caesar a bad name.

It can never be proved that the image on the shroud is Christ. Never. It has also not been proven that it is not Christ and while that might be possible, it might never be achieved.

Some people believe it is definitely Christ. Some believe it is definitely not. I doubt a single one of those people would change their opinions even if some scientist spent his whole life on it. It's a religious icon. It really doesn't matter if it's real or not, all that matters is whether the religious find it affects their faith.

To me, its existence is irrelevant. I am not going to spend time proving or debunking it because it just doesn't matter. It should not matter to atheists, although some like to target it as if by proving that it's just a bedsheet once used by a painter who never bothered to wash, they will somehow bring down the whole of Christianity. Debunking the Turin shroud would have no effect on Christianity. Many Christians don't believe it's real either.

Prove or disprove, it will not affect Christianity and it will not affect the atheists. Therefore, I should conclude that any study is a waste of time. Shouldn't I?

No study, of anything at all, is ever a waste of time. If the Turin shroud interested me I would study it but I would neither be trying to support nor debunk Christianity. I would do it for my own interest, my own satisfaction.

It's really no different to my own work. I study ghosts to satisfy my curiosity. I don't care whether any sceptic is ever swayed by what I find. Let them rage and rant that I'm wasting my time. It's my time, and that's the point. I choose to use it to investigate something that interests me.

That's why I read about research into the Turin shroud, Bigfoot and all the rest. I am interested in the research and am impressed by the tenacity and methods of many of those involved. They might find proof that they consider satisfied their curiosity and maybe I won't believe them. Maybe I will look at their photos and think 'I could photoshop that'. Many people could, these days. It's getting appallingly easy.

I hope they think as I do, that finding the proof to their own satisfaction is all it is about.

Because, really, that is all it is about.

The sceptics will never be swayed. Some people just don't want their comfort zone invaded. Leave them alone, let them live as they wish and believe as they wish.

In the end, it won't matter.

Playing away.

2011-12-19T20:16:00.001Z

Today I have a guest article over at the Book Boost blog. There will be a prize draw among the comments for a signed copy of each of the first and second editions of 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator'.

I have also revamped the old first edition into a pocket-sized book. It did mean shrinking the photos but it looks and feels more like a 'book' (a very small one) than a pamphlet.

There will be a third edition at some point and I think, with that one, I'll try my luck with a publisher.

Apple download

2011-12-14T17:06:00.001Z

There are many reports of odd things dropping from the sky. Fish, various crustaceans and frogs seem to be most common and these are usually put down to tornadoes/waterspouts lifting them from their habitats and dropping them somewhere else.

That's certainly plausible. The UK does get a fair amount of tornado activity, not usually with the strength of those seen elsewhere in the world but once in a while a big one does come along.

Apples though, are an oddity. Especially in December, when they should all have been harvested in September and October.

There are more strong winds forecast. Perhaps there'll be another bizarre celestial delivery somewhere.

Do ghosts die?

2011-12-12T05:06:00.001Z

It's nearly time for the annual (hypothermia permitting) visit to the riverside to look for Jacobites. This year is much less severe than last year, it's cold and icy but it's Scotland and December so that is only to be expected. There's been very little snow so far and none of that -20C nonsense we had last year. Even though it's now 5 am I don't have the heating on because the house insulation is enough. It's looking good for this year's visit.

This Jacobite haunting is a replay event, if it's still there. The images do the same thing at the same time every year. No ghosts, no spirits, nothing to communicate with and about as scary as a movie - because that's exactly what it is. A three-dimensional recording that repeats the same way every time. Christmas is a most appropriate time to watch repeats, I think.

These can be lost if the ground is worked over for new building or for demolition. How the recording is laid down and what makes it replay is not known and it might not be the same in each case. Some just fade over time as if the tape is wearing out. Unfortunately, since we have no idea how these recordings happen, we have no way of preserving them and no means of boosting the signal. Any meddling might ruin the thing for good.

These are, I repeat, not ghosts. Not spirits. Not time-slips and not really paranormal in the strictest sense. Somehow, certain events are recorded on the environment and can be replayed. They do not interact with the observer any more than a politician on the television reacts to the things I say to them. Which is probably for the best because you can be arrested for saying some of those things these days.

Actual ghosts interact, we can converse with them and they are mostly recently deceased. I touched briefly on one aspect of that in the second edition of Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' and will go deeper into it for the next edition. We see Edwardian and Victorian ghosts, sometimes there are reports of cowboys in the USA and even a few, very few in the UK from the reign of Charles the First. Further back, little or nothing.

The few reports of ghost Romans in the UK all sound like recordings. They are re-runs. There are no signs in the UK of ghost Druids or ghost Picts or ghost Anglo-Saxons or ghost Cymric or ghost Vikings or even ghost Normans. Where did they go? There aren't even recording-type phenomena to associate with them.

The older recordings might have been overwritten. In the absence of solid data we have only speculation but suppose that some places are more likely to record events than others. A high level of a particular mineral, maybe, I don't know. I also don't know the required conditions for the recording to start. So let us suppose that certain places can record when the 'record' aspect is active and that if that 'record' aspect is reactivated later, the old recording is overwritten with the new. If it isn't, the old recording stays but fades over time.

Let us further suppose that pressing the 'record' button is not easy and requires some specific and rare combination of conditions, and they might not occur in all recording-places at the same time. That would allow Roman recordings in York to still be there and Jacobites in Scotland and monks at various abbeys in England and cowboys in the USA and Aztecs in Peru and so on.

Back to the point. There are still old recordings around but where are the old ghosts? Scotland is littered with stone circles and menhirs and dolmens with Pictish carvings but none of them have any Pictish ghosts. There are not even ghosts of the Norman invaders here. What happened to them?

Did they all move on to some kind of spirit world or is it worse than that? Did they simply die?

The first response in most people's minds will be 'Don't be silly. They can't die if they're already dead' but they're not dead, are they?

Their physical, flesh and bone body is dead but those spirits move, think and interact. They are not alive in the sense that we are alive but they have a form of life and any form of life could potentially end. Physics demands that they must take in energy in some form. It's not in the form of burger and fries but they must take in energy in order to be active. They are still part of the natural universe and still bound by the basic laws of physics.If they run out of energy and cannot find more, does the same thing happen to them as happens to us?

Over time, those old ghosts vanish. Do they die?

The free story experiment - first results.

2011-12-03T01:44:00.001Z

Some time back, I decided to try out an idea for getting those books known at zero cost to me. I have no marketing training so the thought of throwing money into ideas that might be utterly pointless did not appeal.

From this non-marketer's viewpoint, it seemed to me that the first hurdle to overcome as a writer is getting known as a writer. Publishing is no longer such a hurdle, I have one book with a traditional publisher and prefer to send novels through that route but I have a growing number of self-published titles too. It helps if you are obsessive about spelling and grammar and it's essential to get someone to read over the book before releasing it. If you release a terrible book full of spelling errors and meandering plot lines that lead nowhere, you will certainly get known but for the wrong reasons. It will not improve your chances with the next book.

The idea I came up with was to put out a few short stories as free eBooks and include advertising for the other books in the back. These went to Smashwords because that site allows me to track page views and downloads of the free stories and to examine their effects on pageviews of the other, advertised books.

Smashwords is a terrible place to sell books. It's well known among writers but not so much among readers. Readers tend to go to their preferred large-scale online bookstores such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and others. If your book languishes on Smashwords you won't sell many so it is essential to format it and prepare it correctly so it gets through the 'premium' screening.

Once through that, Smashwords will distribute your eBooks to the major retailers (there seems to be some issue with Amazon but it's easy enough to put eBooks there yourself. It just doesn't seem possible to make them free). That is where people who read will find them.

My zero-cost marketing plan involved, so far, three short stories. These went up some weeks apart as follows:

A Little Knowledge...           25th September
Room Service                      15th October
Bernie's Bargain                   29th October

The pageviews for each peaked after two days and then declined. My guess is that two-three days is how long it takes to scroll far enough down the 'free' listings so that nobody sees it any more.

Each story caused a temporary rise in pageviews of the two short story books on there, Fears of the Old and the New and Dark Thoughts and Demons. Each subsequent story also boosted views of the previous ones. Sales of the short story books were not noticeably improved but on Smashwords, I didn't really expect them to be. I needed those free shorts to get through the 'premium' screen and onto Barnes and Noble and other sites. They did.

As of today, Smashwords downloads for those free stories are as follows:

A Little Knowledge...            200
Room Service                    365
Bernie's Bargain                  163

I don't know how this has affected Jessica's Trap but even if I assume that the same people are downloading all the free ones, then 365 people have adverts for Jessica's Trap and the two short story books. They might not have bought them yet but they are now aware of their existence - and mine - and that's a start.

The main distribution sites report roughly every three months or so. Today Barnes and Noble reported that two of those free eBooks have been picked up from their site - downloads were as follows:

Room Service                     268
Bernie's Bargain                   37

I don't know what happened to the other one. Maybe it didn't make it through the strict B&N requirements. It doesn't matter. I have at least another 268 readers who now know I exist and who have ads for the other books. This little scheme has reached at least 633 people worldwide and it has cost me nothing but a little time. I don't yet know the figures for Kobo, Diesel, Apple etc but I do know there have been sales of the short story books on Kobo and Apple at least.

Best of all, it's still going. New readers are still trickling in through those free eBooks and I have another planned which should, I hope, boost activity again. I will definitely have one out for Christmas because lots of people will get shiny new Kindles and Nooks and they'll be looking for things to fill them up.

The frustrating part is the time it takes to get sales information. I will get a sales report for Jessica's Trap at the end of December but will it show increased sales? Well it depends. It depends on whether there has been any effect on sales and it will also depend on when the retailers report back to the publisher. If they don't report until January then those figures won't be in the publisher's December report.

It's going to take a long time but then this is a new line of business for me, and involves developing an entirely different set of skills from what I am used to. My natural impatience will have to be curbed.

If you decide to try this, here are three important tips.

First, read the Smashwords style guide and do what it says. You really, really need to get through into premium distribution. It costs nothing and it gets those books onto the sites that readers use.

Second, don't include links to books you've published elsewhere in your 'by the same author' pages. Put in your own website, put in publishers' websites, but don't put any bookseller websites. Amazon will not list books that advertise Barnes and Noble, and vice versa. The best option is to have your own website and link to that.

Third, if you have already placed books with Amazon or others, remember to opt out of Smashwords distribution for those sites, otherwise you will just cause confusion. And make sure the prices are the same.

I did this again with 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' using a separate Smashwords account because my fiction is under another name. You can load books onto Amazon using different names but Smashwords don't allow this unless you want to set up a publisher account. They do allow second accounts.

I put up both the first and second editions and not much happened. I then put up an extract from the second edition as a free sample and the downloads started - as did the pageviews on the main books. No sales there yet, but some on Amazon and the first edition is already selling on Barnes and Noble and Apple via Lulu.com, who also do the print versions. I always thought the print version of the first edition cost far too much for such a small book. The second is three times the size and doesn't cost much more in print. As an eBook, that first edition sells pretty well.

Using freebies to boost market reach does seem to be working. It is, at least, getting my name known among readers and it is not costing me anything. Any book sales resulting from this attempt are all profit, no cost.

Am I wasting a good short story? Well, if I sell them, I'll get a one-off payment of $5-$10 and that's all. It's not as if I'm giving away novels here. If those shorts result only in two or three book sales each they'll have made as much as a magazine would have paid anyway. I think this is a more effective use of these shorts, although I will also continue to send them into magazines. I no longer care if the magazines pay - the stories are adverts now.

I will return to this subject in future. There is no point looking at these figures more than once a month because they are subject to the whims of bookseller reporting and won't change much over a week or so.

There might be something to report after Christmas. We'll see.

Nothing for months...

2011-11-22T11:18:00.000Z

... and then two come along on the same day.

A groping poltergeist in Canterbury, and a 'grey ghost' in Bridlington.

Both very physical manifestations, both are able to touch people and move things. The Canterbury poltergeist is not reported to have said anything but the grey ghost in Bridlington apparently talks to a small boy at night. There is no mention of what the grey man talks about, unfortunately.

There is also a rumour of a local demonic apparition which I hope to quiz some people about this week. It might turn out to be another old tale of something nobody's seen for years but you never know.

I still have hopes for the river crossing this year, as long as the mild weather holds. It doesn't need to be snow-free and warm, but I draw the line at temperatures of -20C. That's below zero Farenheit. I'm fairly sure I've narrowed down the location so I hope this winter is one of the less vicious ones.

With the sudden burst of activity, it seems this is an excellent time to publish an updated version of 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' so having finished it, I decided to opt for self-publication. By the time it went through the publishing process, this burst of interest might have faded to nothing again.

The print version is on Lulu and I included a hardback version this time too. It was no effort and no cost which is just as well because nobody will pay hardback prices at Lulu!

Lulu also has the EPUB electronic version and it's also available for Kindle (that link is to the UK site but it will also be on the US, French and German sites). The Nook, Apple and Kobo versions should appear on those sites gradually. There are a lot of formats available on Smashwords too. The first edition is also now on Smashwords.

Formatting eBooks gets easier with practice. Having been brought up to worry about page breaks it is sometimes difficult to remember that eBooks have none. No fixed font size either, in most cases. It's strange to publish something so fluid and changeable.

I tried to keep the tone less angry this time, I really did. I think there are even one or two places where I succeeded. Well, it's published now. Maybe it will be expanded further in the future. There is plenty of scope for that.

I'll put up some extracts later.

Breaking the silence.

2011-11-16T17:06:00.001Z

No, I haven't yet become one of the ghosts I look for. I'm still alive.

The long silence here has been due to concentrating on a rewrite of 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator'. The new version will be longer, more detailed and less rage-fuelled than the first edition. I hope to have that ready by the end of this month.

The first edition was definitely rage-fuelled. I wrote it in a blistering fury brought on by those celebrity ghosthunting shows and by the increasing advice from all and sundry that did no more than part people from their money. Most of the gadgetry has never been shown to achieve anything at all, none of the readings would stand up to any scientific definition of 'evidence' and yet we were hearing that it was all essential.

That was in 2006. Having finally calmed down, I am now able to write a more measured edition with fewer blasts of intense anger. I wasn't going to bother. The first edition was therapy, it was mainly to get some of that fury out of my system. I put it on Lulu and forgot about it. Once every few years, Lulu would send me five dollars in accrued earnings but I didn't do anything to promote the book.

Lulu did not forget about it. They put the print version on Amazon although only on the US site. The price was, I felt, far too high for a small book. I don't think a single copy sold through Amazon.

Then Lulu put the electronic version on the Apple iStore and on Barnes and Noble. That was more reasonably priced and was, of course, immune to postage charges. That started to sell to the point where I thought it was time to take the little book more seriously. Lulu didn't put it on Amazon Kindle and have now had some kind of disagreement with Amazon so the print version soon won't be available there either. No matter, I worked out how to put things on the Kindle store a while ago.

Again, I had not intended to bother putting the first edition on the Kindle. The print copy was there and there would soon be a second edition. When I heard that the print copy was to be withdrawn, I changed my mind. I'd like that first edition to be available to anyone who wants to compare something written by an almost-calm investigator with the sort of high-speed blast of rage that those SWAT-team-like TV ghosthunters can induce in an otherwise reasonable observer.

Besides, I won't be using all the same photos again and I don't want the originals lost. The original documents and photos from that book disappeared in a hard disk crash in the intervening years so all I have of them are the ones in the book. Fortunately Lulu still has the uploaded file so I was able to take that and re-edit it for Kindle conversion.

'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' is therefore now available on the Amazon Kindle in the US, UK, German and French stores as well as on Barnes and Noble and on the Apple iBookstore. Just type 'Romulus Crowe' in the search bar. There is only one of me.

I won't bother putting it on Smashwords because it's already on the three main sites anyway. The only other useful one would be Kobo. I'll look into that, and maybe look at Smashwords again, after I finish the second edition.

There remains the decision whether to self-publish or make use of a link SW sent to me. There are publishers specialising in this kind of book and the services of a professional editor, professional cover artist and someone who actually knows about marketing would be useful.

On the other hand, self-publishing is fast. Lightning fast compared to traditional publishing. Well, that's a decision that is of no relevance until the book is done.

So I suppose I'd better get back to it.

Halloween

2011-10-31T23:30:00.002Z

It's now approaching 11:30 on Halloween. Originally, it began at sunset rather than having its main focus at midnight. The Celts and other ancient races would light a bonfire at the start of the new day (at sunset) and as it died down, they'd leap or run through to cleanse themselves of the demons they might have picked up during the year. Sunset on this night marked the start of a new year.

The Celtic approach was appealing, I think. The day started at sunset, the year started with winter. So all the dark and the cold was out of the way at the beginning of the day or year and the rest was something to look forward to.

It had nothing to do with witchery or calling up spirits. Quite the opposite, it was a time to clear out all those ghosts and demonic entities that might have attached themselves to people throughout the year. That link though, that connection of the time of year with an association of the living and the dead, was always there.

It was always a time of great spirituality even though its meaning has changed over the centuries.

Now it's just another excuse for selling crap and making a bloody nuisance of yourself. This year I have been less welcoming to trick-or-treaters than in previous years. I know, it's hard to imagine that could even be possible. Those who know me will regard my idea of 'tolerant' as not planting tripwires and mines on the path to the house and not pouring boiling oil from the roof.

However, even as recently as last year, I was prepared to give out sweets to those small children. They had made an effort with their costumes, they would tell a terrible joke, and they were polite. This year it's nothing more than roaming gangs of yobs demanding money or treats with menaces. They are not 'trick or treating', they are making the rounds to demand protection payments.

The 'tricks' they apply now have led to calls for the entire event to be banned. My default response to any kind of ban is that it is another example of control freakery and ridiculous State nannying. In this case, it is a response to the actions of the children themselves. When they use an event to terrorise their neighbours they can hardly complain when their neighbours start calling for a ban.

I know they are not all like that. In the recent past, none of them were like that. In my youth, pumpkins were unknown in the UK so we hollowed out turnips, cut faces in them and put candles inside. The stench was incredible. Pumpkins are the same but bigger, so their lids don't char quite so fast. We tried to catch apples in water or hanging from strings. We did not hammer on neighbours' doors until they opened and then proceeded to demand a treat in exchange for not vandalising their home.

Here, money collection was associated with the following week's event, Guy Fawkes Night on November 5th. The Christian church moved the bonfire there so the common folk still had their bonfire, but now it was separated entirely from anything spiritual and associated with a man who tried to bring down Parliament. We used to call him 'traitor' but we don't now. Anyway, kids would make a life-sized dummy and wheel it around asking for a 'penny for the guy'. That money was put towards the fireworks. At no time was anyone threatened with tricks or bricks.

Costumes used to be home-made, now they are on sale in huge racks in supermarkets. Pre-carved plastic pumpkins and rubber bats and puppet skeletons are everywhere for at least a month beforehand. It's not as bad as Christmas yet - Christmas stuff went on sale even before the Halloween things.

Tonight used to be about spirituality, with an element of fun for the children. Now? Now it's an excuse to go marauding and terrorising and vandalising and their parents excuse it all with 'it's just a bit of fun'

Well, when I send your child home in instalments, that's just a bit of fun too. A fun way to put the death back into Halloween. We used to enjoy Halloween as children, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of fun.

Demanding payment with threats is not a bit of fun. It's a criminal act. I don't want to see the whole thing banned, so children, stop behaving in a way that will get it banned.

The current ban-freaks don't need much of an excuse, you know.

Writing about demons.

2011-10-21T20:12:00.000+01:00

I am well aware that many people don't believe in the existence of ghosts or demons. Even those who might have experienced the attentions of the supernatural can often simply reason it away as imagination. I don't blame them, it's easier to just push it aside and just get on with life.

I am also aware that many of those who do believe in their existence of demons will have nothing to do with them. Again, I can't blame people for this, demons can be dangerous and are best avoided.

It does, however, make books about demons a hard sell. Especially for those like me who insist on using the researched demons rather than just making one up. I know the Jehovah's Witnesses will never buy any of my books because their rules forbid even passing contact with the spirit world.

So it's nice to see a good review of one of those books once in a while.

As to the experiment with free stories, that seems to be generating very interesting results. A third story should produce some data I can actually analyse. Then again, in the lead-up to Halloween, the demand for this kind of story might be skewed so I'll have to continue after Halloween to see if the trend continues.

I like writing. You can do it indoors, in the warm, with the lights on.

The appliance of science.

2011-10-17T00:37:00.000+01:00

Since I know nothing at all of marketing methods, I decided to apply scientific ones to the selling of books. An experiment, in other words.

Smashwords is the best place to do this because they let you see how many pageviews you're getting on each book. At this early stage, this information is even more useful than sales numbers.

The way Smashwords and pretty much every other self-publishing distributor operates is that their front page shows the latest releases. So if you put a free story on there, it appears on the front page but rapidly scrolls off. Smashwords allows readers to select by genre and by price so those looking for free horror stories will see it scroll more slowly than those looking at the general list.

What happened with the first free story was that it peaked after two days, both on pageviews and downloads, then dropped away to a level of around two to three views/downloads a day, and then it died altogether after three weeks.

What's interesting was that the pageviews for the two collections followed the same pattern (these are advertised at the end of the free story). There was no remarkable boost in sales, but the free story means that a lot of people who didn't know the collections existed, now know they exist. Whether they come back and buy them, only time will tell.

I put up another free story on Friday morning. That has, so far, followed the exact same pattern with the pageviews on the collections following again. This time, it also boosted pageviews and downloads of the first free story - so those who have both stories now have two sets of ads for the collections. Will it improve sales of the collections? They are modestly priced, so it's possible.

It might take a few free stories to get those books moving but so far, it seems the best way to do this is to put up a free short story every 2-3 weeks or so. Too many and you're doing too much free work, using up time you could be applying to full-size books and collections, and swamping out the paid books. Too few and people forget about you.

Am I wasting short stories? Well, if you sell a short, you'll get a small one-off payment and that's it. No multiple sales, no royalties, just that one payment. Giving the shorts away free is not going to lose you the cost of the mortgage. Maybe the price of a beer.

If you publish in a magazine, your story is surrounded by the advertisers who pay the magazine for space. There's nothing wrong with that, it's how most magazines stay alive. On the other hand, if you give away the story yourself, that advertising space is all yours and it's free.

At this stage the free stories are not getting the other books sold but they are getting them noticed - and nobody can buy a book unless they know it exists. The experiment is in its early stages so it's too soon to say how well this will work, but it's costing nothing more than time. Time to write and edit the short story and time to produce a cover. Both of these must be treated as if they were for a 'selling' book. Don't think 'Ah, it's free, this'll do' because the advertising is not confined to the 'by the same author' part at the end.

The advert is the entire story. If it's rubbish, readers will assume the paid-for books will be rubbish too. You haven't just wasted a story, you've done terrible harm to your reputation. The idea is to get readers to think 'That was good. What else is there?' rather than 'Well, that was terrible. I'm not paying to read his other stuff'.

So these free shorts get edited, they get proofread, they get rewrites and tweaks just as the full books do. The covers take time and with little artistic ability, I use photographs and Paint Shop to make them. I only use photos I've taken myself so there's no issue of copyright. They take time but the cover is the first thing anyone sees. If it looks awful, that 'back' button is just one click away.

The sudden surge in sales of 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' is entirely separate, and mostly applies to the Apple iBooks which I can't access. My fiction is under the name 'H K Hillman' so nobody would see an immediate connection between that and the ghosthunting book. That surge is, I suspect, due to the approach of Halloween and I wish I'd had that second edition ready! There might still be time.

I also (obviously) include ads for Jessica's Trap but as that's published by Eternal Press, I don't have instant access to sales or pageviews. I can only assess that one on the basis of quarterly reports, of which there have been two so far. The first was dreadful, the second was less dreadful, the third might reach the dizzy heights of almost good. I'll know at the end of December. For a first novel by an unknown author, it would have been surprising if it had done any better.The silver lining is that it's making money, not costing money. Not very much but it's early days.

The second novel has progressed to a full-manuscript request which is good (but not certain, not yet) and the third is just about ready to start going through the process. Hopefully this experiment will translate into the world of publishing, where the appearance of the second novel boosts interest in the first.

Publishing is just the start. Nobody can buy your work if they aren't aware of its existence and that's what marketing is supposed to achieve. I have no idea how to be a marketer so I'm applying the techniques I understand instead. Experiment, modify and experiment again.

Eventually I might get this right.

Hallowe'en is coming.

2011-10-12T20:16:00.002+01:00

I always enjoy Hallowe'en even though it's not the same as when I was small. It used to be about ducking for apples and scary stories at the fireside. Now it's all dress-up and street begging and sweets and plastic skeletons.

Still, it's fun, and the remembrance of the day keeps the ghostly aspects in everyone's mind.

I know there are people who don't like Hallowe'en although I didn't realise there was a rare phobia whereby a few people are actually terrified of it. It can't be physiological because nothing physiological happens. Like the irrational fear of the number 13 it must be a learned phobia.

It could be instilled by a religious upbringing or by an overbearing parent and it would be a very hard one to cure by traditional means. The event only happens once a year. Not much scope for getting accustomed to it.

Maybe that grouchy neighbour who will have nothing to do with the event isn't just being miserable. Maybe it actually terrifies them.

Perhaps, this year, I won't deliberately set out to scare them.

Perhaps.

Unidentified flying seagull.

2011-10-12T04:39:00.001+01:00

The photograph of the circular object has now been unveiled at the Cornwall UFO Research Group (CUFORG), which was founded by Dave Gillham in 1995
He said: 'The person who took the photo never saw anything in the area while taking the photo.
'It was only when he got home and downloaded it onto his computer that he saw an object - a disc shaped craft, hovering just above the sea.
'There appear to be two trails of water beneath the object which looks as though they are falling from it in to the sea. It could be that the object has just emerged from the sea.'

It. Is. A .Seagull.

An object lesson in loss of credibility parallelled only by the proliferation of 'orbs' and 'rods' since the advent of digital cameras. Proclaim an obvious piece of junk as proof and everything you've done so far, no matter how great, just falls to the ground.

The picture shows a seagull, and judging by the dark wings most likely a herring gull, flying from right to left across the camera. You can even see its eye. No more, no less, nothing at all supernatural or extraterrestrial here. It's a blurry photo of a bird. We all have those.

This UFO group have just destroyed any belief in their objectivity and hammered their credibility into the ground. Was it worth it? For a seagull? Really? Their 'trails of water' are the sails of yachts. That's what the photographer was trying to catch but they were too far away. The eyepiece of a cheap camera doesn't make that part clear.

I notice 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' is suddenly doing well on the Apple iBookstore for some reason.

I hope it's because people are starting to take these things seriously. Time to accelerate the second edition, perhaps.

So... is it a scam or not?

2011-10-07T03:45:00.000+01:00

The Northwest Passage across the Arctic is currently open to shipping. This is the end of summer so it'll be frozen soon. The fact that this route is possible is claimed as proof of melting ice caps and therefore global warming.

Take a closer look.

The Northwest Passage was impassable in 1978 even with modern icebreaking steel hulls. Now it's open. So that proves global warming, right?

But wait - it was navigated by a Norwegian in a wooden sailing vessel in 1905. No steel hull and no fancy gear. How is that possible?

Then there are the moths. A now-rare species, the flame brocade moth, has appeared in southern England this summer. It's come here from warmer climes in Africa. So, does that prove global warming?

Wait - look at this line.

The large numbers of the flame brocade moth, which used to live in Sussex in the second half of the 19th century...

So in the late 1800s, southern England was warm enough for this moth to be a natural resident but now it struggles to visit. Just a few years later, the 'impassable' Northwest Passage was in fact passed by a wooden sailing ship.

The article on the polar ice tells us what the ice was like thirty years ago compared to now. It does not tell us what it was like a hundred years ago when wooden ships could sail through it and tropical moths lived in England. Afterwards, the moths left England for Africa and the Northwest Passage froze shut. Now we are gradually returning to the conditions seen in the late 1800s/early 1900s and we're not warm enough to compete with them yet.

Yet this is all presented as evidence of global warming caused by modern people, and as a reason to tax us all into the poorhouse.

For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I am not convinced.

Another Yeti hunt.

2011-10-03T23:36:00.000+01:00

There is to be another expedition to seek out the Yeti in Siberia. It's an elusive creature, if it's real, but then Siberia is a very big place with not many people so you could probably hide a herd of mammoths there without anyone noticing.

One of the scientists thinks Yetis are surviving Neanderthals. I hadn't thought of that before. The Neanderthals were real but were outcompeted by us. It is possible that they retreated into those places we never visit and that a few small populations still exist. Not certain, but possible.

It's only recently that we've discovered the coelacanth, a fish thought to have gone extinct many thousands of years ago. Also the giant squid, the Kraken that ancient sailors were laughed at for describing. There are huge tracts of land on this planet where humans don't go, there are Amazonian tribes nobody has contacted, there is a forest in Indonesia where animals aren't scared of humans because they've never seen any before, and expeditions into these unknown areas are still finding new species. Is it possible that there are Neanderthals still? I'd say yes, it's possible.

Are they Yetis? Well, Neanderthals were hairier than us but not nearly as hairy as the description of Yetis (and Bigfoot, for that matter). Perhaps they've developed more hair, or perhaps they're wearing animal skins sewn into an all-over suit. Or perhaps Yetis are not Neanderthals at all. We'll just have to wait and see.

I wish the expedition luck and will be waiting here (a long way from Siberia) to hear what they find.

This time, I hope it's more than a few snapped branches and footprints in the snow.

Science by magician.

2011-09-29T01:21:00.000+01:00

Another stage psychic has been toppled by a stage magician who admits he was once a fake psychic himself. Is it just me, or is this new world where stage magicians operate as scientific debunkers disturbing anyone else?

Paul Zenon is a magician. His magic isn't real and he does not pretend that it is. It's clever and it's often hard to work out how it's done, but it's done with physical trickery. Not with wands and pointy hats. He states that he has used cold reading in the past to trick audiences. Other magicians have done the same.

I recall one British magician who 'proved' that astrology was bunk by writing a newspaper-column-type generalised reading and showing that it applied to everyone. No big surprise, pick any star sign in the newspaper and you can work it into something that's happened in your life. That does not prove that a full reading done by an astrologer who has your precise birth details is wrong. All it proved was that the newspaper columns are generalised junk. We already knew that.

I have no faith in stage psychics. Finding the right number of ghosts to fill a show, with no long blank spaces and no ghost that doesn't relate to the audience, looks dodgy from the outset. If they really are calling up the spirits of the dead to order, that's not mediumship. That's necromancy and anyone involved in that is best avoided.

I don't think any stage psychic is a real medium. A real one would be constantly distracted if they just threw themselves open to any and all ghosts around them and there's no other way to run such a show. Ghosts don't form orderly queues.

One line in that article caught my attention -

...it is still illegal in this country to claim to be a medium...

Well, it's illegal to make money from the claim, but it seems to be just fine if you say 'psychic' instead. The law here is a shambles.

I really don't think you'd ever see a real medium on the stage. It doesn't work to TV schedules. As with the magician's debunking of newspaper astrology, it does not prove there is no real life counterpart. Actually speaking to ghosts is not a profitable occupation, they rarely have anything interesting to say and they don't know the lottery numbers because they can't see the future. Many are a bit hazy on the past, never mind the future. They also tend to turn up more by chance than anything else. Mediums do not summon spirits. That is a different and much darker practice.

Worse, if you go around telling people you see and hear the dead, chances are you'll soon have your very own rubber room. This society is not very forgiving of those who are different from what it defines as normal. So getting mediums to come forward isn't as easy as it sounds.Those who do speak out know they are likely to find themselves on some pretty hefty medication.

Medicine will tell you that 'the voices aren't real' and hold up proof in the form of 'well, the drugs stopped the voices so they were never real'. Were the voices never real, or did the drugs merely block the patient's ability to hear them? Medicine doesn't care. The symptom is gone, the patient is cured. Next!

I agree with the magician's statement that stage mediumship is almost certainly entirely a con. It's entertainment and as long as you see it as entertainment, no problem. Just as you know the magician is using trickery, be aware that the stage psychic is also using trickery.

That does not mean that ghosts don't exist nor does it mean that nobody can see them.

Even so, it does disturb me that this sort of thing is left to stage magicians while science merely dismisses the entire subject with 'I don't believe it'. Science is not supposed to be about belief.

Increasingly, in many areas, it is.

Old dog, new tricks.

2011-09-27T22:14:00.001+01:00

When I wrote 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' and put it on Lulu, I did it in what can best be described as a fit of truculence.

It's not much of a book, a mere 30-page pamphlet really, and it happened because I kept reading 'manuals' that told the reader they'd need this or that device and they'd need this or that preparation and all of them were concerned with electronics and gadgetry

There is no such thing as a ghost detector. EMF meters measure electromagnetic fields and fluctuations in such fields might or might not mean there's a ghost around. They might mean the fridge has just switched on and caused a voltage spike throughout the mains. You don’t have to be in the same room as the fridge to measure it.

These new tri-field meters are expensive, and are sensitive enough to measure EMF changes caused by the cash in your pocket moving around. They are useless in the hands of anyone who is not used to handling such sensitive equipment and are a waste of money. They are not ghost detectors. Until we have some idea what ghosts are made of, we cannot devise any machinery capable of detecting them.

All that infrared gadgetry is likewise useless unless you understand infrared. When you point one of those infrared thermometers at a ‘cold spot’ it does not magically stop its measuring range just where you want it. It’s measuring the temperature of the first solid object it hits and the further away that object is, the wider the circle of measurement. That means moving it slightly can change the temperature reading because it’s averaging over a wide area. It is not, under any circumstances, measuring air temperature.

See? Just a mention of all that nonsense and I’m in rant mode at once. Don’t even get me started on orbs or I’ll run this post into thesis size. There is much more but I’ll save it for the revised version, which will be big enough to be actually worth calling a book.

The point is, I wrote that book, put it on Lulu and that was enough to get that rant out of my system. I did nothing to advertise it and forgot about it until Lulu sent me a tiny amount of money. It came as a surprise to find that people were buying it.

Well, now I have branched out into actual fiction and so I’ve had to learn about marketing. I had absolutely no idea where to start. It’s not something that science training is much help with – we investigate and write it up in a dry and dusty manner for a journal. Then we move on to the next project.

When I was just hobby-writing short stories, it was pretty much the same as writing papers except the papers were all in past-tense, impersonal, passive voice and the fiction needed an entirely different approach. Writing the occasional newspaper article had helped with that but even so, the attitude was the same as with papers. It’s done, it’s published, move on. There was never any point in ‘marketing’ a short story. I was paid at the point of acceptance and there was no royalty to push for.

I’m fortunate in that the first book – Jessica’s Trap – was taken up by a publisher, so they took care of editing and cover art and some marketing. However, I still need to push it myself because publishers release loads of books and don’t care too much which ones are big and which fail. They’ll concentrate on the successes and ignore the failures. That’s how business works. If you want to be one of the successes you have to work for it. That's how life works.

The other two so far are short story collections. I self-published those because unless you’re already famous, short story collections are nearly impossible to sell to a publisher. The first one, ‘Fears of the Old and the New’, was made up of stories I’d published in the past. The magazines and online sites had either scrolled those stories off the page or had gone out of business. The rights had reverted to me but with first rights already sold, there was no profit in hawking them round again.

I made that book so I wouldn’t lose the stories and again, was surprised when it sold.Then came ‘Dark Thoughts and Demons’, a second collection of shorts. By now I was starting to take writing seriously so this one, along with the earlier one, I put on Kindle and Smashwords as well as in print and PDF on Lulu. Look for my writing 'name' - H. K. Hillman - on those sites.

Writing, editing, proofreading, production, even half-decent covers – I can do those things.Maybe not proper artisitic covers but fairly presentable ones, I think. Still I had no idea how to market them. Finally I realised I was looking at it the wrong way. I was trying to think like a marketer, and I’m not one. Instead, I started wondering how advertisers managed to get me to pick up their ads.

Offer me a flyer and I’ll either ignore it or accept it and then drop it unread into the first bin I pass. Just as most people do. What gets me to keep an ad is if it’s attached to something that’s free.

Not something of great consequence or value. Just something free. If it’s a fridge magnet I might stick it on the fridge and maybe, one day, actually read it. I have bottle openers with ads on them, and pens and mugs and keyrings... but these are all costly to produce and difficult to distribute.

So what could I attach an advert to?Well, a story costs nothing to write. Nothing but time. Not so long ago, it would have been impossible to make use of this as an advertising medium because it would have to be printed and handed out.

Now, all it needs is a decent cover and it can go onto all the electronic distribution channels as a free short story – with ads for the full books at the end. Best of all, it costs nothing. Zero outlay, apart from a couple of evenings to bash out and edit a 3000-word story.

I have not worked out how to make things free on Kindle. The minimum price seems to be 99 cents but there are free books on there so it can be done. I’ll work on that. Hints would be welcome.

I can make it free on Smashwords which does (in theory) distribute to Kindle but that part doesn’t seem to work. All their other distribution channels work just fine. The Kindle format version is free on Smashwords anyway, as are all the other formats.

This, then, is a whole new game for me. I have, as yet, no idea of the rules so I’m working them out as I go along. One thing is clear – don’t attach ads to a rubbish story. The story is the advertisement and if it’s dull and full of errors, those reading it will assume the same will be true of the books.

While I didn’t pick one of the best to give away free, I made sure it was one of those I consider at least ‘good’.Will it work? I put it on Smashwords less than 48 hours ago and so far there are 91 downloads. It’s slowing as it scrolls down the ‘new free ebooks’ list but adding another in a few days might perk it up again.

I have no idea how many of those who read it will want to read more, only time will tell.As a marketing ploy, I have no idea how good this will be but as a cost-effective marketing ploy, it’s excellent. The cost is zero. Not many marketing techniques can say that.

So. Worth a try. If anyone has any tips on how to get books under the noses of readers, I’ll be interested to hear them.

This old dog is always willing to learn new tricks.

Teaching vs. indoctrination.

2011-09-20T23:39:00.000+01:00

Creationism vs. evolution - which is right?

First of all, my declaration of disinterest. I really don't care which is right. Looking at the state of the world makes me far more concerned about where we're going than where we came from. Whether the universe was created by a higher being or popped into existence all by itself simply doesn't matter at all. Whichever stance you take, you have to base it on a belief in the teachings of others because there is no means available to work it out for yourself. So I refuse to worry about it.

What does worry me is the increasing encroachment of things like this - and it goes way beyond this one item - into schools. Children are being indoctrinated at younger and younger ages into belief systems that look like science ard are not. And before 'science' gets all smug becasue they think I only mean creationism here - I mean all of it.

Children are told that if their parents smoke, their parents will die within weeks. This is child abuse. Children are told that unless their parents follow the Green God of Climatology, their parents will die and so will they. This is also child abuse. These children are being terrified by lies told to them by their teachers/indoctrinators.

If you are convinced of the scam that is global warming, take a look at this. Yes, the warmists are now falsifying maps of Greenland to pretend it's turning into the Sudan. If you rely on that map for your next trip to Greenland you're going to get a nasty shock. Meanwhile, here in the UK, we have been warned to expect snow in October. You see, 'weather is not climate' when it gets cold, but 'climate change is proven' when it gets warm. That's what passes for science now. It has followers, like any other religion, who do not question the pronouncements of the experts (the new name for high priests) and who denounce any who disagree as heretics.

It is no longer any different from any other religion.

The 'five-a-day' fruit and vegetable requirement? A made-up number. Those who made it up have admitted they made it up but the acolytes still follow it anyway,. The 'alcohol units limits'? More made-up numbers. Again, those who made it up have admitted it is based on nothing at all and yet the acolytes follow it anyway.

Lately we have seen both Climatology and Tobacco Control departments in universities (yes, really, there are tobacco control departments in universities now) refuse to disclose their data because they say it's private. It's paid for with public money, and if it's so robust, what's the problem? It makes the rest of us wonder if any data exists at all. It makes the rest of us wonder if there is any science left.

Only the faithful now support these pseudoscientists. Oh, and public money. Lots and lots of it.

Evolution is a component of the biological sciences and should be taught in schools to those pupils who opt for biology as a subject. There is no sense at all in teaching something as complex as evolutionary theory to pupils who are going to become business managers, plasterers, bricklayers, not even those who are going to be physicists, chemists or doctors. It is of no relevance to their specialism at all. Evolution is a component of biology and that is all. Stop turning it into a damn religion.

Creationism is a component of religious teaching and should be taught to children in religion classes. Not in science classes because it doesn't belong there. Like evolution, it is of no relevance to those who do not opt for religion so it should remain as a component of religion.

Neither of these belongs in the mainstream curriculum. They are both specialised components of specialised subjects and should be taught only by teachers who know what they are talking about. They should not be attempted by teachers taking a general class of younger pupils.

Neither should the complex biology of smoking nor the medical complexities of alcohol metabolism and certainly not global climate science.

Children as young as five are bombarded with what can only be described as propaganda delivered by indoctrinators. They live their young lives in terror that the world will end any day or that they'll wake up and find their parents dead.

They leave school barely able to read or add up, their heads filled with preconceived half-truths and outright lies and with qualifications that qualify them to pass a test and no more.

Meanwhile more and more single-issue pressure groups insist that their personal prejudice is taught to younger and younger children as if it was the truth.

I am very much against Dawkins' interference in the schooling system. Not because I'm a creationist - I'm not - but because it is yet another single-issue 'We are right and they are wrong' indoctrination, and there is far too much of that already. More and more of it is pouring into schools now and there seems no end to it.

When I was at school, they taught us how to think. We were shown how to work out mathematical problems and how to construct basic English then given harder problems to which we applied those principles. We were not indoctrinated with predetermined answers, we were expected to find our own.

Now children are taught what to think, and thinking the wrong thing will get them in trouble. There is no room for alternative views any more. That is not school. That is a clone factory.

Science is never, never 'settled'. Only religious tracts are immutable. Science that is immutable is indistinguishable from religion and if you follow anything that is 'settled' you are following a religion, not science.

Therefore I remain at the fringes of mainstream science and am glad to be here. Out here we ignore the declarations of the shamans and do not accept the commandments of the high priests. You can rail and bluster and tell me you don't 'believe' in what I do and I will tell you that I don't care what you 'believe'. I am not here to convince you of anything, only to try to persuade you to leave the hive-mind and at least consider the possibilities.

I don't care what you think. I only care that you think it for yourself.

Give children that opportunity too. Unless you're happy to produce a race of Eloi?

Meddling with things I don't really understand.

2011-09-17T03:02:00.000+01:00

I have been meddling with Blogger, as you see. I'm not sure about this template, it's a bit bright but I'll meddle some more and see if I can tone it down without crashing the whole thing.

The new interface will take some getting used to. I also have a new toy, a comment enhancement thing from some people with surreal hair, no shoes and a tree in their office. It's free but really, they should charge enough to be able to afford some shoes.

It apparently works by finding famous people's names and... doing something. So if I mention Tony Blair or Sarah Palin, for example, it should pick up on any comments referring to them. I thought I'd give it a try.

I've been meddling in computer matters a lot recently. I worked out how to put books on Kindle so I have two short story collections there now, Fears of the Old and the New, and Dark Thoughts and Demons. Both are also on Lulu.com for those who prefer print. When I have finished rewriting 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' I'll put that in there too. Perhaps I shouldn't have so many projects running at once, and should concentrate on finishing them one at a time.

The weather has been desperately bad for the last few years here. Rain, wind and cold. In fact, one of the best days we had was when the rest of the country had a hurricane.This means I'm not going out investigating very much at all. I'm supposed to be looking for ghosts, not becoming one.

With all this time on my hands and all these research materials sitting around with nothing to do, I've taken to writing a lot more lately and finally took that side of things seriously when Jessica's Trap was accepted by a publisher. It was one of those 'Really? I can do this?' moments.

If I can do it, I plan to do it to the best of my ability. As with all things. How good that ability actually is remains to be seen but it will be the best I can do.

Otherwise there'd be no point doing it at all.

Supernovas and predictions.

2011-09-10T02:52:00.005+01:00

There is a supernova in the sky at the moment and as with all such events, Scotland has laid on a thick layer of cloud to frustrate viewing. It'll be there for a few days so I hope to catch sight of it in a break in the cloud layer before it's too late.

If you're in the Northern hemisphere, look for the constellation called Ursa Major, also called the Plough or Big Dipper. It looks like a saucepan and the supernova is a little above the outer two stars of the handle.

It was once believed that such celestial events were portents of disaster. Coming, as it does, just before the tenth anniversary of the mindless murder of around three thousand people on September 11th, 2001, it could be argued that it's ten years too late. Although when we have a peace envoy like this idiot, it might be best to be prepared anyway.

Something that happened at least ten years before 2001 might also be of interest. An artist made this picture which, at the time, would have looked like the product of a migraine-induced bad dream. Apparently - and I have no way of knowing if it's true or not - the picture was drawn in or before 1989.

I suspect the artist suffered migraines because there are two stylised instances of what I call 'migraine flare' in the top right of the picture. There might be a better medical term but I do not mention all my visual anomalies to doctors because that could get me sectioned.

Is there any connection? Did the artist dream about the events of 11th September 2001 twelve years before they happened? Two towers - repeated - and two planes, but not just any planes, passenger jets. The planes are not aimed at the buildings so maybe he didn't predict anything. There is nothing to suggest a prediction, nothing to connect the picture with the World Trade Centre until after the event. But even if he had drawn planes flying into towers, who would have paid any attention?

Even if he had seen the whole event and painted it exactly as it happened and included the date and time it was to happen, seriously, would you have listened or would you have scoffed? Personally, if you had said to me on 10th September 2001 that madmen were going to fly planes into the World Trade Centre I'd have laughed you out of the room. Prophecy has always been a thankless task and to be honest, if I knew a terrible thing was to happen tomorrow I would say nothing.

Why? In the current climate of fearful, weak humanity, if it was shown that I knew anything about the disaster before it happened, I'd be blamed for it.

The artist made no claim to prediction. He just drew what was in his head, possibly just something he dreamed that he thought would make an interesting picture. Maybe he had no idea that anything would ever connect that image to reality.

Science laymen, of course, regard such things as 'woo' but at the same time, quantum science questions even the linearity of time. Biology has stated that all humans predict the future, all the time. We have to. The conversion of light into images on the retina, the transfer of that information to the brain, the brain making sense of it, takes time. Not much time but if you're trying to catch a ball, it has passed the point where you see it as soon as you see it. You catch the ball because your brain predicts its trajectory and moves your hand to where it will be, not to where your eyes say it is.

The world you see has already moved into the past. Nobody sees the present. So is it at all conceivable that anyone could see the future?

There is the process of logical deduction. If I see a ball moving I can predict where it's going. So can you. We don't even have to think about it. World politics is more complex. However, take some current world events.

Bin Laden has been killed. The tenth anniversary of what is possibly the most evil action since the Holocaust is approaching. The demon-faced 'peace envoy' to the Middle East has declared he wants 'regime change' in Iran and we all know what that means, as does Iran.

So it is no stretch of logic to predict that something will be attempted on Sunday. Where? That's not so easy to determine logically (the variables in this thought experiment are not all subject to logical actions) but I would guess somewhere in America and somewhere important, but probably not New York. Security is going to be, rightly, very tight indeed.

What will be attempted? Well, it will involve the killing of easy targets because the madmen don't like face-to-face battles. It will be an attack on a densely concentrated civilian target. I don't know America well enough to even guess where but I am sure American analysts have been considering this for quite some time. I can only hope they catch the swines before they do anything.

The three who recently entered America and who are being hunted are, I would say, red herrings. There have been ten years to plan whatever they plan. If something is planned, those who are to act it out are already in place. Yes, they are lunatics, but they are not stupid.

I should note here that I do not equate 'madmen' and 'Muslim'. We had quite a bit of inconvenience with the IRA here in the UK a few years ago but despite meeting many Irish people, I never met an IRA member nor indeed anyone who referred to them as anything other than 'nuts'. Likewise, I have never met a Muslim who called for my destruction - and I've published papers with two Muslim students and would be delighted to teach another. How many students can produce enough work for a full paper in eight weeks? Both of those Muslim students did.

In the UK we treat Muslims as suspect. We say 'Their first loyalty is to Islam'. How soon we forget. Only a few centuries ago we said about Catholics that 'their first loyalty is to the Pope', and a century or so before that, the King ordered the Jews out of Britain. If schools still taught real history, this wouldn't be a surprise.

I have experienced the new wave of hate against the smoker, the drinker, the overweight, well, everyone who doesn't conform to the Borg standard. These are as nothing to someone who sees ghosts. We might think it strange that fundamentalists can persuade an idiot to blow themselves up in a shopping centre but how many of you believe in second hand smoke, the evil of alcohol, global warming and so much of the current wave of pseudoscience blasting out now? It is incredibly easy to persuade almost anyone to believe almost anything.

My grandfather smoked and so did my father and so did I for a long time. Still do if nobody's watching. I grew up in homes with coal fires, I set off fireworks and burned bonfires, I made my own explosives, and the odd thing is, I'm not dead after inhaling all that smoke.

Yet now, I hear of parents who wash and change clothes before touching their children because of third hand smoke. I hear of grandparents excluded from their grandchildren because they smoke.

The point is, these people will believe anything at all, even the utterly ludicrous. I've tested it far beyond the old cold-reading tricks. The fun I've had...

Yet they do not believe predictions even though scientifically, it is at least not impossible whereas scientifically, harm from third hand smoke is impossible. The quantum vision of time means that the past and future can leak into the present and once in a while someone will see it. Maybe as a dream, maybe as waking vision, as might have been the case in Versailles in 1901. Quantum science allows that, yet popular science denies it. The drones, those who are not scientists but believe in the power of the great god Science, will dismiss any deviation from their indoctrination at once, but real science does not. There isn't much of that left.

Maybe some people see the future. I don't see that as a magical paranormal ability, but more as a quantum-time accident. Or maybe as a simple result of assimilating information and predicting on the basis of logical extrapolation. Some people can do that without knowing what they are doing.

Predicting the future is possible. It can happen. Although in the world we have now, if it happens to you, I'd advise you to keep quiet about it.

Money and Justice.

2011-08-30T23:18:00.004+01:00

If you get the chance to see 'O Lucky Man' (1973), don't miss it but be warned - in parts it goes far beyond simply weird.

The UK news sites often link to stories from around the world, and this one illustrates the establishment obsession with money very nicely. The judge made the right call, I think, in jailing this 15-year-old in this case, even though he only stole seven cents.

No, I am not turning into a Victorian flog-them-and-hang-them type. Despite the bleating of his lawyer -

“For seven cents, now you’re making someone a felon for the rest of his life,” she said.

He was not jailed 'for seven cents'. He was jailed for beating up an elderly man, then forcing him at gunpoint (they say they were BB guns but in that situation, would you take a chance?) to hand over the contents of his pockets, then denying it even though both the victim and his accomplice identified him.

The contents of the victim's pockets are not relevant. If they had stolen no more than a piece of string, or taken a million dollars, they were not convicted by the amount. They were convicted for what they did. They assaulted an elderly man and robbed him at gunpoint. That is what they did, not 'stole seven cents'.

Trying to use the small amount stolen as a defence is pathetic, but it is typical of the attitude of so many these days. It is good to see a judge who takes the right approach, not so good to see a lawyer grade crimes by the amount stolen rather than by the severity of the attack.

Unfortunately there is a lot of this happening now. Keep in mind if you're ever in court, you are less important than money.

Except in Judge William Walsh's court. I hope his attitude catches on.

Facts and fiction.

2011-08-28T02:51:00.004+01:00

Another washout summer is nearly over, and the economic woes have ousted anything paranormal from the news. There's been little to investigate and apart from a new experience of my own that's keeping just out of sight so far, nothing at all for me to do. So I've been writing some short stories and novels instead. Well, why let all that research go to waste? If I can't use it on facts I might as well use it on fiction.

For me, though, it is important to distinguish fact from fiction. An attitude that seems sadly lacking in many areas of alleged science lately. Often, the science is twisted to fit a political agenda and objectivity is abandoned in favour of preconceived conclusions supported by tortuously twisted figures.

So we hear that biscuits cause cancer and that fat people cause global warming, the reduction in smoking prevalence that matches with the exponential rise of asthma means that smoking causes asthma, the gradual decline in alcohol consumption is evidence of an outbreak of binge drinking and aliens are going to kill us all because they don't like us having power stations.

That last one is not something I made up. Neither are any of the others. They are all things that were made up by people employed as scientists. Paid, I might add, from tax revenues. I would prefer to have the likes of Clive Barker or Stephen King paid through taxes. At least they make it clear they are just making up stories.

Not all scientists are like this. There are still quite a few who believe in the actual principles of science and who seek the truth rather than the money. There are still some out there.

You won't hear about them very often and when you do, you will hear them decried as heretics. They are not following the plan.

I remember a head of department retiring in the days before I became self-employed. One line of his speech really stayed with me. He said "When I started in science, we were chasing knowledge. Now we're just chasing money."

Since he retired, things have become much worse.

The truth has a way of coming out no matter how hard the control freaks try to suppress it. They never learn.

Money and reality.

2011-08-24T11:06:00.000+01:00

I'm often told, in my line of interest, that 'ghosts don't exist'. That I should concentrate on real life and the here and now and making money. So I can buy lots of things I don't want.

A long time ago I had a running argument on this blog with an Australian and missed a golden opportunity. When he gave me three options, one of which was true, I should have told him which was true without letting on how I did it. This was a case of transglobal cold reading. He had already told me the answer without realising. I could have pretended that the online 'readings' were all genuine and he would not have heard me scoff and snort as I typed it. I have demonstrably achieved cold reading from the other side of the planet and I was playing for free. Do you really imagine the phone lines and internet readers are about anything more than money?

The world is obsessed with money. Every lifestyle choice is derided as 'costing the health service money' even though we (in the UK) have no option but to pay into that health service whether we use it or not. I've made a little use of it but if I hadn't had to pay for it, I'd have gone private and had change to spare.

Problems in the world? Oh, we'll send money. No matter that sending money into a corrupt regime simply makes the corrupt richer and the poor notice no difference. We've sent money, the problem is solved. Oh, it isn't? Send some more.

There are those in the world who are religious. I'm not one. I've seen ghosts (spirits/demons if you prefer) and experienced things that convince me there is much more to life than we can normally see, but I have seen no evidence that anyone is in charge. I don't 'deny God', I just have no evidence. So I don't call myself atheist because that's becoming a religion too, and one of the nastier ones. I'm an apathist. There might be a God but as long as he leaves me alone I won't bother him.

The religious are also subject to this 'get into reality' mantra. Get a job, knuckle down, earn money. Money is the only thing that's real.

You know what? Money isn't real at all. Most of it simply does not exist. At all. If everyone wanted their money out of the bank in cash there is nowhere near enough cash to achieve this. Most money is numbers on a screen. It's not real. Look at your national debt. You do not owe all the money in the world. You owe more money than exists. Every country owes money. To whom? To banks.

You go into the bank for a loan, the bank says okay, and what happens? Do you walk out with a bag of cash? No, the numbers in your account go up - but there are no numbers going down anywhere else. That money has not been transferred, it has simply been created out of thin air. You have to pay back the non-existent money plus interest, and the interest is real money.

Okay, you can claim that you can spend the loan but how? With cheque, credit card, bank transfer, online account? Where's the cash? You go to the car dealer, show them the loan certificate, sign the form and you have a car. But where's the cash?

So you repay the loan plus interest, all from the products of your work. If you can't pay, the bank takes your car and then what? They write off the loan of money that didn't exist and they now own something that does exist - your car. Or your furniture, your new kitchen or even your house.

Modern money is no longer backed by gold or silver. It made the transition from there to paper and from paper to database digits. It is less real than telepathy, remote viewing, ghosts, religion or Bugs Bunny. You can at least see some evidence, whether you agree with it or not, for all those things. Money? No, you can't see it. You can see numbers that represent it but that's all. No, not even a cartoon rabbit. It never manifests into anything close to reality.

Why do governments insist we have to keep the economy going? Well, because if we stop using credit cards and other means of moving this ghostly currency around, it will stop moving. If it stops moving we might see what it actually is. Illusion. Fake. A charlatan's greatest confidence trick. We have swapped faith, life and independence for nothing at all. Some paper with famous people's pictures on them. We are trading bubblegum cards and calling it investment.

The modern obsession with money is a religion. A Puritan one but backed up with neither scripture nor science. We must stop people smoking/drinking/putting on weight/eating things we deem bad for them and it is not about health, although many have been fooled into believing this is the reason. No, plebian, nobody cares about you. They care about Money.

Look at any report on smoking, drinking, the overweight, anything. Look at the comments. Do you see 'Oh, these poor people, we must help them,' or do you see 'Kill them all in the most appalling way imaginable and do it now'?

About health? No. It's about money. 'Our tax dollars'. Have you ever paid tax? I haven't. I've signed cheques, I've authorised bank transfers to the taxman, I've worked where tax is deducted before you get paid but I have never handed over one single thing I actually cared about, and not one note of real cash. All I have ever done, where tax is concerned, is move numbers around. That is all it takes. That is all there is where modern money is concerned.

Money is everything and nothing. The appropriate demon here would be Mammon, I believe, although I have yet to look into that in detail.

It used to be said that 'the love of money is the root of all evil'. Often corrupted to 'Money is the root of all evil' but really, neither is exactly right.

The worship of money as if it were the Saviour of the World is the problem. Throwing money at drug barons to stop them dealing drugs cannot work, but we do it anyway. Throwing money into regimes where the problem is the creaming off of money by officials cannot work but we do it anyway. In the UK we had riots by Reebok-wearing and designer-hoodie clad thugs who believed they were entitled to more than they were ever interested in earning. The Great God Money must come into their wallets, not their hearts (I doubt they have any) and feed them plasma TV and laptops they have no clue how to use.

Yet when faced with real life's astounding events, pictured in the news, all Mammon's disciples can shout is 'Photoshop'. To them, nothing amazing can happen unless Money is involved. At the same time, they claim to despise religion while following one of the most fundamental religions in existence. Money. Is this not a religion? Tell me why.

Money was devised as a tool. Let's say I catch fish and need a table. The guy who makes tables doesn't like fish. So I sell my fish for cash and use that cash to buy a table, and the table maker uses the cash to buy chicken. That was how it was supposed to work.

It was not supposed to become a god variously described as 'our money, who art in tax heaven, wasteful be thy spending' or as 'economy'. It has. We can think of nothing else. We have become thirteenth century peasants spending every waking minute worrying about whether God (Economy) will permit our crops (Investments) to grow this year. Go on, explain why I'm wrong.

In olden days, some people became hermits and just said 'The hell with it' to society. The reasons might have changed a little but I think I can understand why they did.

When the reality you are ordered to embrace is less substantial than the one you are expected to leave, you have to wonder if there is really any other sensible way to respond.

The most pointless thing in the world.

2011-08-14T04:36:00.003+01:00

There are many toys and models based on film characters and old comic book heroes and villians. I don't have any because I'm too old and too uninterested.

I have a friend's birthday approaching so I was looking for something inconsequential and generally just fun as a present, and happened across the most pointless item that has ever been on sale.

It's a little slab of black plastic. It's a 'model' of the black slab from '2001: A Space Idiocy' and it does... nothing at all. Not a thing. It's a slab. That's it. An extraordinarily expensive lump of plastic in a packet.

For the price, I'd at least expect to see stars inside it.

What would make an interesting study for me is this - is anyone really stupid enough to buy it?

Midsummer night drenched.

2011-06-20T23:00:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow is midsummer day. Normally I like to stay up to watch the sunrise. Not for any religious reason, it's just that sunrise is around 4 am and staying up to see it isn't much of a task.

I'm not bothering this year. The heating is on, the outside temperature is 7C / 44F and that's from the sensor that's inside the greenhouse. The sky is completely overcast and it's raining. There's no point staying up to watch the clouds get brighter.

Meanwhile, the cost of heating is going up even more to counteract 'global warming' even though in years past, I spent many evenings drinking cider in the garden at this time of year. In my attic is an electric fan that has not been used for the last three summers. The heating used to be switched off completely from May to September but not any more.

Global warming has been the biggest con trick of the century. It kills more and more old people every winter because they can't afford the huge cost of heating. It's destroying businesses with ridiculous carbon taxes and setting us all up for no power at all in the future when all we have to rely on will be solar panels in the dark and windmills in calm weather.

Al Gore should be facing charges in every country that's fallen for his scam.

Heads up!

2011-06-09T02:07:00.004+01:00

Literally.

There has apparently been a bit of a fuss on the surface of the Sun and while the eruption isn't aimed in our direction, some of it might come our way.

Possibly enough for a decent Aurora on the night of the 8th, 9th and maybe 10th June.

At the moment it's after 2 am on 10th June (GMT) and no sign of activity here. If it happens, it might happen tonight in other parts of the world or it might be tomorrow night.

Although with the current state of science, it might not happen at all.

I hope it does. It's years since I last saw it.

Update 12th June: No sign of any auroras here. Looks like it was just another baseless scare story.

I suppose we'd better get used to them. So-called 'science' gets most of its funding this way now.

It's not the end of the world.

2011-05-22T03:49:00.002+01:00

The end of the world came and went again and nothing at all happened. There have been a great many of these. It's a bit like the boy who cried 'Wolf'. One day someone will be right and nobody will take any notice.

My own prediction was absolutely correct. I didn't win the lottery.

Saving the world.

2011-05-21T00:45:00.003+01:00

I bought a lottery ticket today. First time in a very long time. I won't win, never have and never will. I am convinced God finds it amusing to make sure I have the numbers right next to the winning ones every time.

The draw is at 7 pm tomorrow. Unfortunately the end of the world is scheduled for 6 pm (UK time). So, if God wants to continue his unbroken run of ensuring I just miss the lottery numbers, he will have to postpone Armageddon.

There you are, I have just saved the world and it only cost one shiny British pound.

So on Sunday, assuming we are all still here, six billion people each owe me a pound. I think that's a fair price for saving everyone and it'll be the easiest six billion I've ever made.

There is one possible drawback. If I have the winning ticket, we're all doomed.

Unfortunately for Harold Camping, he is doomed either way because what he is predicting is not Armageddon, but the Rapture. That's the part where the faithful get called to Heaven before all the nasty and weird stuff begins. Actually, looking at the news, I think the Rapture must have already happened some time ago.

The thing about the rapture is that unless you're included in the Holy Removal Company's list, you won't know it's happened. Some living people will vanish but most of those on the list are already dead. So even if he's right, nothing will happen at 6pm Saturday, at least nothing anyone will notice. Harold Camping is going to face ridicule whether he's right or wrong. Unless, of course, he's on the list.

Camping, a civil engineer who once ran his own construction business, plans to spend the day with his wife in Alameda, in northern California, and watch doomsday unfold on television.

Somehow I very much doubt that God planned to distribute Armageddon via reality-TV, although these days it's the only thing he could use that most people would notice. I have planned a book called 'The Armageddon Show' but I don't think I can finish it by 6pm. I certainly can't get it published by then. It would be intensely irritating to find the story on TV before I've even finished writing it.

I was going to cut the grass tomorrow. I don't think I'll bother. If Harold is right, I'd have the deaths of millions of blades of grass to account for.

If he's wrong I can do it on Sunday.

Of ants and men.

2011-05-18T00:17:00.003+01:00

There are many fungi, and some worms, that infect insects and take over their brains. It's not just insects. There is a parasite that can force a snail to expose itself to danger and make it flash its eyestalks so a bird will easily find and eat it. The parasite needs to move into a bird for the next stage of its life cycle and rather than leave it to chance, it actually takes control of the snail's physiology. Pretty impressive for something that has no brain of its own.

I wonder if there is one that makes people become politicians. But then that would assume a politician has a brain, of which there is scant evidence anywhere in the world.

Here's an interesting story. It's in a UK newspaper (well, more of a hack-rag but they do have some interesting things sometimes) and includes a video that could have come straight from the set of an alien-style movie, but it's real. I hope the article is available outside the UK or this whole post is going to look pretty silly.

Once you've been horrified at what a lowly fungus can do to a much more complex organism, consider something else. Consider the narrator. He's not just some reporter reading a script, he's a well-known nature expert and he didn't get to know as much as he does by having the attention span of a caffeine-laden fruit fly. In-depth study of anything needs concentration and application. That's how you make progress.

How confident would you be crossing a bridge built by Insanity Prawn Boy? How happy would you be in a skyscraper designed by Cornholio? 'Not very' is the answer I'd expect there. (You can find them on YouTube if you haven't met them before. Insanity Prawn Boy is in a series called 'On the Moon' and Cornholio is from 'Beavis and Butthead').

So you would think, faced with a class full of children who struggle to read something engrossing like Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and can't hold interest in any book for more than a hundred pages, you'd want to do something about it. These are future bridge-builders and architects and doctors and okay, a lot of them are future supermarket-trolley-collectors and some won't even be much good at that but even so. Some will progress into life-critical jobs and we really need those people to be paying attention.

The solution proposed is to take away the hard stuff and put the whole class back on 'Janet and John' books. What is the point? As an ex-lecturer, I despair. I used to teach people who had reached physical, if not always mental adulthood and I would not compromise. I was teaching B.Sc. and if you were not able to keep up, then you weren't B.Sc. material. Try HND. A perfectly respectable qualification which I also taught, but biased more towards practical application rather than head-filling theory.

In those days, the B.Sc students were expected to go on to be scientists and the HND students would be technicians. Now it's seen as some kind of failure to become a technician. I don't see why. Scientists cannot function without technicians. The scientist comes up with the idea but the technician knows how to work the machinery and knows how to fix it when it (inevitably) goes wrong. They are two parts of the same thing and one part struggles when the other is missing.

You can take it to any level. Sure, the big architect can design a town but someone has to sweep those streets or it'll be a pigsty within weeks. A world full of architects and no street-sweepers is going to be a very unpleasant place to live. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine what it would be like if nobody wanted to work on sewage disposal.

The current rubbish about 'no child left behind' ensures we will one day see buildings created by people who have learned the first hundred pages of a five-thousand-page series on safe building design. Old houses will soar in value. New ones won't be worth the number on the door.

It's simple. Some people are attuned to literature and some are not. Some people rave about Homer's Iliad and I found it the dullest block of print I have ever seen. Some dismiss the Gormenghast trilogy as the product of a swivel-eyed lunatic (which is fair enough) and I thought it was great. People are different and that applies right from birth.

This is not eugenics. Eugenics is a ridiculous concept that seeks to only breed the brightest and best of humanity and to cull the rest. Yeah. Great. So who sweeps the streets? Who deals with sewage? Who collects the trolleys in the supermarket - in fact, who works in the supermarket at all? Who works in the farms and factories that supply the supermarkets? Eugenics does not lead to Utopia, it can only lead to a Hell in which everyone has great ideas and nobody ever does anything about them.

That is not what the current system is creating. We are creating a generation of trolley-collectors because anyone who looks as if they might be better than Dim Jim in the corner is branded 'elitist' and denied the deep education they could cope with.

It is not wrong to teach the able to the best of their ability. It is neither wrong nor shameful to take a career as a sewer operative or a bin collector or a bus driver or a street sweeper. Civilisation needs all of them. It might be fashionable to tell children that growing up to be a grave digger is beneath them but someone has to do it. It is an essential job and one which, sooner or later, we would all like to have done by a professional. Not by some blundering idiot with five degrees and a professorship but who doesn't know one end of a shovel from the other.

The real solution is competition. I used this to great effect on a PhD student who was not working to her obvious potential. I told her I didn't expect too much because she was only a woman. Now I would be hauled before a disciplinary committee for saying it but you know what? She sailed through her thesis and produced a boatload of publications on the way just to prove me wrong. I have never told her I knew I was wrong all along. There is stuff in that thesis that is not yet published and there is a journal's worth of work that isn't even in the thesis. She was far better than she ever knew and although I have lost touch, I expect her to still be doing brilliant things.

If she's not, and if she happens across this, it's because you're only a woman, Shortly (she'll know what it means). If she is sitting at home doing nothing I will find out where she lives and come around and insult her in person. She already knows what that means.

Competition does not only bring out the best in the brilliant. It moves everyone up a notch. That future trolley collector might put some effort in and become a till operator. You may sneer but if you've experienced a North Scotland winter, indoors is far better than outdoors and the pay is better too. You have to deal with idiots, sure, but we all do. There are a lot of them around.

Civilisation needs people who can think up new stuff but it also needs people who can make the new stuff work. The brain is a wonderful thing but with no hands it is absolutely useless. It's all very well to design a sewage system that means nobody has to have a pile of poo in their garden but someone has to run it.

The future technicians, sewage workers, trolley collectors, till operators and street sweepers are now children. So are the future surgeons, scientists and architects. They are all essential and they have all been born.

Forcing sameness on children does not mean equality.

It means Hell.

"If you're good at something...

2011-05-15T05:46:00.002+01:00

..never do it for free."

So said Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman film 'The Dark Knight'. I confess I had to look it up even though I've seen all the Batman films.

I will never charge for an investigation of the paranormal beyond travel and accomodation and I don't need any of that first-class nonsense. I will travel by bus and I will sleep on your sofa. The biggest expense will be whisky, and bacon sandwiches. Most of the time I probably won't find a ghost anyway, just a rattly fridge, a dodgy electrical connection, a vent transmitting the neighbours' voices or a faulty motor in a fan. Besides, any attempt at charging will let the sceptics lump me in with sideshow fortune tellers and TV 'psychics' and that is not my aim.

I have other ways to earn money. One that was my hobby has now become a serious matter because the first novel is published. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it proves I'm doing it right but on the other, it's not a hobby any more because the taxman is involved now. It feels a bit like having your train set taken over by the railway company and forced to run to a timetable. Sure, you can make more money but that hobby is now a job.

The little book called 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' really just happened because I was sick of reading books that tell you to form some kind of Mission Impossible team, with uniforms and gadgetry and battle plans. None of that is necessary and none of it is any use. There is no such thing as a ghost detector. Until we have some idea what ghosts are made of, such a device cannot exist. It hasn't sold many copies but I didn't expect it to sell any at all. People like to believe that their EMF meters jolt because there's a ghost around, not because the fridge just switched on and sent a voltage spike through the house electrics. They like to believe that their laser-aimed infrared thermometers read the air in front of them, not the wall they're pointed at. They don't like to hear that in the modern world, there are many, many things that might appear to be paranormal but aren't.

Most of all I was sick of hearing the idea that every investigation must produce a result, as shown on TV. Ninety-nine percent of investigations get you nothing more than cold and tired. Orbs are a delusion, not a result. They are bunk. If you can't see the little light, it's not there. Your camera does not have magical powers to see things you can't, it just has dust in front of the lens. I've been working on a new and extended version of that book but writing it was a hobby until now.

As were the short stories I'd been producing. They earned nothing or nearly nothing. I didn't do it for the money. I did it for fun.

When I put the first load of short stories into a book, I did it because they had dropped off the internet or gone out of print. Magazines, print or internet, only keep the stories up for a little while and then they're gone. Often, the magazine shuts down too so all trace is gone. I put a collection together so I wouldn't lose those stories and I did it with a hastily-made cover because it was only to be for me. I didn't expect it to sell so I made the download version free. It did sell. Not much, but it moved. So I updated the cover into something a bit more professional-looking and put a small price on the download. If you have the old cover with the blue sky, look after it. It might be worth something when I'm dead. The new cover looks like this:

It's the same photo I used for the old cover. I grafted in a new sky, darkened the image and added some lighting effects. The name? Never publish under your precise name and never sign books with the same signature you use on cheques. To a modern fraudster, that's worth a lot more than the price of the book. A nom-de-plume protects much more than your privacy these days.

That cover, and the cover of 'Ghosthunting' is the reason I don't like digital cameras. It is far too easy to manipulate a digital image to add in a 'ghost'. With film you have an original negative that can be verified as un-tampered but with digital you can change the image, change the date of the file, change anything and it's hard to prove whether it's real or fake.

One thing I have found is that people don't regard writing as work. This mirrors Southern Writer's experiences with astrology. People think that since they don't see any effort, they don't have to pay you for the work. I've already lost count of how many people have generously offered to read my writing as a favour to me, because that's all a writer needs. Writers don't need to eat or live in houses. All they need is someone to read the words they write. Readers aren't entertained by the stories, they are only reading as a favour to the writer.

Well... no. The taxman wants his cut and the electricity company want to be paid for running the computer I type on and food isn't free. Writing is work, even if it only appears to involve moving fingers around. If you don't want to read it you don't have to pay for it. I have no such option with taxes, food, utilities and housing.

It's not a hobby any more. It's another business and businesses don't last long when they're done for free.

Song for Bin Laden.

2011-05-10T05:28:00.001+01:00

Although it could apply to most world-leading figures too...

If you haven't seen the film this came from, it's worth it.

Profiting from the nearly dead.

2011-05-10T03:29:00.003+01:00

Another explanation for near-death experiences has appeared. Surprisingly, once more, it's from someone selling a book.

I wish I could start a scandal or do something controversial. Apparently it's how books are sold now.

The thing about near-death experiences is that they are intensely personal and only happen while someone is unconscious. There is currently no way to study them directly, as they happen. They might have a completely physiological explanation, they might not. As things stand there is no way to be sure.

Several such cases include the experiencer relating things they should not have been able to know. Pick the physiological explanation out of that.

At the moment there is only one way to know for sure what happens after death. And when you know, you can't tell anyone.

I can wait.

Time-lapse apology.

2011-05-08T03:58:00.005+01:00

Never post when in a rage. You just have to go back the next day and edit the red-mist blunders out of it.

Anyhow, I have calmed down a little because I have avoided looking at the newspapers today. If you do read the papers always save the cartoons for last. You don't want to use up the only smile-inducing thing in the whole paper too soon.

One story I did pick up on another blog was the news that the Spanish have apologised to the Jews for the Spanish Inquisition.

Yes, I stopped and paused for a while too. Yes, it was over four hundred years ago. Yes, the Inquisition targeted Muslims and Protestants and atheists too - in fact, it targeted all non-Catholics and quite a few Catholics for good measure.

Sometimes I wonder if all politicians everywhere spend their time looking for something to apologise for. Sooner or later some idiot is going to apologise for the apocalyptic effect on the environment caused by the invention of the wheel.

It seems an Israeli group asked for this apology. What astounds me is that they got it. So when is Italy going to apologise for the Roman Empire? When are the French going to apologise for the Norman Invasion? And the Vikings - oh, you guys are going to need kneepads for the apologies you have to make.

The human race started in Africa and spread from there all over the planet. So it's all Africa's fault and they should apologise. If you're religious, the human race came from Eden which would have been around the region of Iraq/Iran so to you, it's their fault.

Since Christianity and Islam both sprang from the original Judaism, when are the Jews going to apologise for the Ottoman Empire and the Crusades?

How far back does this ridiculous guilt-fest have to go before someone says 'Okay, it's just getting silly now'? For me it passed that point quite some time ago.

One day there will be demands for God to apologise for the Big Bang. He probably will because by now, even he must be thinking that it wasn't such a good idea after all.

Enough!

2011-05-07T02:03:00.003+01:00

These days, it's all about asteroids.

We are supposed to live in terror because an asteroid won't hit the planet but might pass close enough that you could see it with a telescope. All this is probably great for selling newspapers but the ghostly hints are being pushed aside.

You know that scene in 'Men in Black' where they pick up a trashy paper for clues? It's no joke. Only the trashy papers will publish those stories and while most are junk, there are a few gems to be found in there. Not lately. All we have are asteroids and terrorists and other imaginary things to be frightened of.

Now, it's hard to find a ghost story anywhere that is not a blatant photoshop-type hoax. The hoaxes were always around and always fairly easy to spot but once in a while there was that odd, inexplicable one. They're all gone. Vanished among the terror of smoke, salt, booze and fat.

I have therefore been spending a lot of time just making stuff up. Well, everyone else does these days. Science is now more about imagination than reality so I have switched to imagination. At least I label my efforts in this direction as fiction and separate them from real science, which these days seems to make me a rarity.

The climate science debacle, the tobacco, fat, salt, alcohol and so on nonsense, have all brought mainstream science into depths of absurdity that have never been plumbed by the paranormal, nor even by witchcraft, alchemy nor even Celtic shamanism. Compared to much of modern science and the rigour by which it reports its results, I am not only mainstream I am at the top!

I should be pleased but in fact I am sickened.

There is no point attempting to prove anything through science when science is so corrupt. Third hand smoke. Passive obesity. Obesity epidemic. Stuff that Kafka would have dismissed as too incredible. All of it is such absolute crap and yet we have heads of important institutions nodding and saying 'Yes, this utter crap must be believed'.

I have to prove to these people that the ghosts I see are real? Why? I might as well try to prove to a lunatic that the jewels in his milk are just refractions of the sun. Which I could, but these days, why bother? He is as sane as the major leaders of any scientific institution in the world. Perhaps more sane. And less dangerous.

So the hell with it. I will continue to search for proof but in the current climate of science, I will apply my own rules. There will be no fake stats or imaginary conclusions here. I might become the last outpost of a forgotten dream called 'science' but I will hide it behind fiction that holds clues.

That's the game now. Somewhere in the fiction are the things I have really found out about life, afterlife, otherlife and non-life. I will hide them in plain sight but I will call it fiction.

Science, which believes so much trivial nonsense these days, will dismiss me as a crank as they always have. Then they will earnestly discuss passive drinking as if it could actually exist.

Some of the fiction will just be fiction. Some of it will not be. There is a lot here that should be told but cannot be told through a twisted modern science that follows Paganism but not Pan.

There will be changes here.

The Mountain.

2011-04-22T02:29:00.004+01:00

If you haven't yet seen this video, I recommend it. An amazing example of intermittent video. How he can get a smooth video while moving a camera that's taking intermittent shots is beyond me. Then there are the night-sky shots. Usually you'd need a long exposure and a motorised camera mount to follow the stars. He seems to be able to take one-off shots of the night sky that are nothing short of astounding.

This man has some very expensive camera gear, I think.

I confess. I am jealous. However, he does not, as far as I know, have a picture of a wood pigeon on a red pergola.

So nyah.

Email

2011-04-16T02:17:00.002+01:00

Email is broken. It wasn't me, it was the Email gremlins.

I owe Emails, but I can't do it today.

Better late than never.

2011-04-14T00:21:00.002+01:00

A man is to be buried exactly 190 years after he died. There's not much left of him, there are bones and there's a book bound in his skin, but he is finally getting buried.

Well, his bones are. There's no mention of whether the book is going in too. Somehow I doubt it. As for the rest of him, I suspect there are parts in formalin in a basement somewhere.

It's the sort of thing that happens when doctors get hold of you.

Cowcatchers from Space.

2011-04-13T23:44:00.003+01:00

Cattle mutilation has a long history and it's in the news again. Cattle are found dead, no footprints leading to or from the carcass, and with bits missing. It's been happening for a long time and it still happens now.

I know there are sceptics who will snort and say 'It's all nonsense, it doesn't happen'. There are too many documented cases for this approach to have any merit. It does happen. Why, how and who, are unknown but the actual event certainly does occur. Simply denying the event is like a blind man denying the sky is blue. It's a frankly silly apporach.

Nobody has ever seen one of these mutilations take place even though there have been thousands of documented cases. All anyone ever sees is the dead animal afterwards. They'd be put down to spontaneous deaths if it wasn't for the consistent mutilations.

I can't figure it out. The 'who' theories include secret government tests, but if they wanted to test some kind of weapon on cows they could simply buy cows at the market and arouse no suspicion at all. Well, aside from the inevitable black suits and sunglasses and the black cattle trailers. They just can't help themselves there. Still, stealing them, killing them and then dumping the corpse where it will be found is not what you'd expect any secretive organisation to do.

The aliens get the blame too, of course. Again, if they wanted to test something without humans finding out, they aren't doing a very good job of hiding their activities. The dumped corpse would at least make sense. There can't be a lot of room in the spaceships so they'd only keep the parts they wanted.

In either case, they could at least weight the corpse and dump it at sea. Or in the wilds where it won't be found until most of it has been eaten. That would be the sensible course because the missing parts then won't be noticed.

The 'how' seems to be pretty much unanimously agreed. Some kind of flying craft - helicopter or spaceship - grabs the cow and lifts it. These flying machines are stealth ones so nobody hears them or sees them. Very expensive machines. Then they take a few bits, meddle with the corpse and dump it.

Whoever is doing this, it must be costing them a fortune. Yet they don't take rump steaks. They take tongues and eyes and reproductive organs and ears. The cheapest parts on the butcher's shelf. In fact, I'll bet most butchers would give you the eyes and ears for free. So it's an extraordinarily expensive way to steal the bits of cattle nobody wanted anyway. They could simply collect these by the bucket load at any slaughterhouse. Apart from tongues. Those are popular with a lot of people, but they're cheap.

The 'why' is absolutely mystifying. Why go to the enormous expense and trouble, not to mention the risk of arrest, by stealing these cattle, and then keeping the least edible parts and dumping the rest with no attempt at hiding the crime?

If you wanted those parts for some kind of experiment, ritual, or just to make stew, they're all cheap or free. Why steal them? If you wanted a whole cow for some nefarious purpose, why not just buy one? They're expensive, but you can buy an awful lot of cows and transport for the price of a stealth helicopter.

Finally, if it really had to be secret and totally untraceable, why not make use of wild deer or cattle? Why take the ones that someone is going to miss, and why leave them in places, and in a condition, where the involvement of the authorities is inevitable?

As I said, the fact of these cattle mutilations is undeniable. It happens.

I just can't find any logical reason for anyone, human or alien, to do it.

Money matters.

2011-04-11T23:41:00.002+01:00

I hate money. It's confusing. Unfortunately everyone needs to have some these days. If you want to live in a house, even if you own it outright, there are taxes due just because you choose to live in one place. So even having no income does not allow you to escape tax. You have to continually earn money even if you don't owe any to anyone, and when you earn money, they tax that too. It's a game you can't win and can't opt out of unless you live in a tent in the mountains. I have been tempted.

Then there's all the food and clothing and electricity which I could produce myself but then I'd spend all day, every day, doing that and nothing else. I don't really want to live like a 13th century peasant, no matter how much our government want me to. On the other hand, my idea for rain-power is still on the drawing board. We get far more of that than sun here.

Years ago, I lived in a flat with a mortgage. It was small and cheap and to be honest, I didn't like living there very much. The mortgage was of the endowment type, which means you only pay the mortgage interest every month and then pay into a sort-of insurance policy that is meant to cover the price of the house when the mortgage is due.

What I wish I had known at the time is that a) there's no guarantee the policy will pay as much as you'll need and b) if the amount owed stays the same, so does the interest. With an ordinary repayment mortgage, you pay the interest and part of the capital every month. So the interest reduces as the amount owed reduces.

Well, I sold the flat a long time ago but let the endowment continue. Cashing in early would have meant losing money and it wasn't expensive to keep going. Then I bought a bigger house (this time with an ordinary repayment mortgage). I reasoned that the endowment would knock a big chunk out of this mortgage when it became due, and it's now due.

So they sent me forms. Lots of forms. They have taken payments from my bank account for all these years and never cared who I was but now it's time to pay out it's all 'Oh, sorry? Do we know you?'

It's simple. Just pay the money into the same account it's been coming out of for 25 years. The account hasn't changed. Yet I had to send photo ID to people who have never met me and who have no idea what I look like. I had to have my signature witnessed by someone who works in finance. I send forms back, they send new forms. It's like some weird game of postal tennis. Why does it have to be so complex?

If I'd known the hell I'd have to go through to get this money back out I wouldn't have spent the last 25 years paying in.

This wad of cash would take about a third off the remaining mortgage and that is my only debt. I have no other loans at all. Debt makes me nervous. If I were ever to win the lottery, my first act would be to pay off the mortgage and my second would be to get a T-shirt printed with 'Ha! I owe nothing.'

The only financial advice I'd offer anyone is - keep it simple. Don't be swayed by fancy plans promising huge returns. If you don't fully understand it, take nobody's word for it, don't get involved.

Anyway, the latest forms went off today. Their turn now.

Making good use of down time.

2011-04-02T01:31:00.006+01:00

I've been trying to find the April Fool articles in the news. The spoofs, the joke reports. There are always some. Years ago this was reasonably easy, but now the real news is so bizarre it's impossible to find the spoofs. I've given up. How can any spoof compete with such news as that of Gaddafi's government fleeing for sanctuary to the UK, one of the countries they're at war with and the very country that is still enraged about the release of Al-Megrahi? Most of the news now looks as if it was written by the Monty Python team while exceptionally drunk and probably high on something. And, most likely, while having a psychotic episode. How can any spoof story possibly compete?

In real life, this is a busy time of year because the tax year ends on April 5th. Any expenditure that is tax deductible is best done this week so it's deducted from this year's taxes. Any danger of income is best avoided for a week because that gives me another year before I have to pay tax on it. Devious, I know, but our Government are 100% stupid and will waste any tax money they get, so the less they get, the less stupidity they can engage in. I think of it as a service to society.

There has been nothing to report on anything paranormal for many months. The weather is improving in that the snow is now rain, and it doesn't freeze you to the ground any more so with luck I'll get out somewhere soon. There's a ruined church I've been looking at for a long time. Last Christmas Eve's regular visit to the Inverurie battle site was abandoned due to extreme cold. Next year I'll stock up on extreme cold gear just in case so I don't miss it again. The year before, I thought I was very close to getting something so it was intensely frustrating to be frozen out last year.

I don't waste the down time. Some will be aware that I also write stories based, not on fact, but on fiction. The background research I do comes in very handy when spinning plausible tales. Naturally I do this under another name because being a scientist and especially in this field, the phrase 'I write fiction' is best avoided.

So you will find that the demons mentioned in 'Jessica's Trap', the first novel I have managed to rouse myself into submitting enough times to find an interested publisher, are all to be found in a real book called the Goetia, an old book of magic, part of the Lemegeton. Many of the books you hear about in such stories are real. The Key of Solomon, the Grimoire of Armadel, many of them genuinely exist - whether they are, in themselves, genuine is another matter.

Then there are fictional tomes such as the Necronomicon which is a creation of H.P. Lovecraft, so skilfully hinted at in his stories that many people believe such a book actually exists. It does not and never has. Two of those I use in my fiction don't exist either but all the rest do. I have copies - translations in paperback, not originals. I'll never be able to afford the originals, they would strain even Bill Gates' bank account. They would be useless to me anyway because I would still need to pay someone to translate them for me! Goetia (translation) is available on Amazon, as are others, but ignore Aleister Crowley's illustrations. He was obsessed with - how to put this delicately - the schoolboy imaginings of how far the middle leg could grow. All the demons he drew have genitalia that would make an elephant's eyes bulge. I elected to leave out that part from my own stories to avoid an XXX rating.

Jessica's Trap is available in paperback already even though it is not slated for release until April 7th. You can find it on Amazon. com and on Amazon.co.uk. It will also be available on Kindle and as a PDF from the publisher, I hope before the 7th.

There is one out there who has no need to buy a copy. The editor had an easy ride and changed nothing of importance so the pre-acceptance copy reviewed by Southern Writer is the same as the one on sale. Except, the new version has a professional cover.

Currently my spare time is taken up with another book reviewed by SW. I bought the Kindle version even though it's not much cheaper than the print version because a) the Kindle is a new toy, b) there's no postage and c) it arrives within a minute of pressing 'buy'.

It's a book no hardened sceptic can bear to read. It is reasonable and restrained on the subject of anomalous events and restricts itself to factual accounts with referrable material. I'd write a review myself but I haven't finished reading it and SW has already done a good job of it.

Here's what SW has to say. From what I've read so far, I'm likely to agree completely.

And now, since it's raining, I'm just going to make up stories. The trouble with scientists is that if you want a zombie that can grow back its head, scientists can come up with a plausible way for it to happen. In fact, we have to. We're the ones who hiss though our teeth at the so-called biochemist in 'Red Planet' and who cannot accept that the lord of Mordor can be destroyed just by melting his ring. When we write scary we don't just write 'it might possibly happen' scary. We write 'oh yes, it certainly could happen and could well be happening now, behind you' scary.

So while the ghosts aren't scaring anyone, I'll do it. Hey, I'll be dead one day so best get the practice in.

Boom.

2011-03-28T06:43:00.004+01:00

How many nuclear bombs have gone off in the world?

If you'd asked me up until recently I'd have said two. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oh, wait, there was the test bomb in the USA, then all the fuss about Bikini Atholl where the French tested a bomb and then the British tests in Australia, so maybe ten, or a few more?

Two nuclear bombs were used in war. Two. How many were tested?

This animation shows, in the top right, the month and year. Around the edges are country flags with the number of bombs exploded. Flashes show where they went off. In the bottom right is the total of nuclear bombs. Not explosions. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc are not counted. Only deliberate bombs.

By 1998, thirteen years ago, before the Korean tests, more than two thousand nuclear bombs had been detonated on planet Earth. If you are worried about fallout from the Japanese quake-damaged reactor, forget it. That won't even blip on your background radiation now.

The Japanese have never developed a nuclear bomb. For a good reason. They have seen what it can do.

Two bombs on Japan. Two thousand on the planet. I think that should just about cover it.

Cancer rates started booming in the fifties. Officially, there is no connection.

Edit Damn this widescreen fad. The video edge is clipped. It's best to double-click it and watch on YouTube.

Chasing the moon.

2011-03-20T00:53:00.003Z

Typical. It was clear skies all day and as soon as night fell, the clouds rolled in. This is the best one so far, but I haven't given up for the night yet.

The full size image would make a great book cover at least. So it's not a total waste of an evening.

Additional - This, I think, is the best I'll get with a digital camera. Most of them come out overexposed so it's just a white disc. The trick is to use a fast shutter speed, which you can get if your camera has a 'sport' setting. A tripod is, of course, essential because you'll need to use maximum zoom. Mine has 12X optical zoom. Never use digital zoom. It's rubbish.

Maybe I can enhance the contrast. I'll try later.

Supermoon.

2011-03-14T02:00:00.002Z

On March 19th, the moon is full and is also at its closest point to Earth on its elliptical orbit. There is a great deal of fuss being generated about this, and this astronomical event is already being blamed for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami even though it's still five days from happening.

Why does the full moon matter? Because a full moon means the Earth is directly between the moon and the sun. However, the moon's gravity and the difference in distance over its orbit is just not enough to raise so much as the hairs on the back of your neck. There is no measurable physical effect of this event, and certainly no measurable effect a week before it even happens.

The full moon has psychological effects on people. That has been recognised for a long time, hence the term 'lunatic' and the association of all kinds of weird behaviours with the full moon.

The moon influences tides, we know this for certain.

But plate tectonics? Moving water around is one thing, moving rock is quite another. The moon just doesn't have the density to exert that kind of pull on subterranean rocks. If it did, we'd all feel lighter and weigh measurably less during one of these events due to the moon's gravity counteracting part of Earth's. If it can shift continental plates it will certainly affect little organic masses like us. It doesn't.

So no, next week's supermoon did not cause last week's disaster.

It is, however, a great photo opportunity if the clouds are kind to us.

Interesting Things - 6.

2011-03-14T01:49:00.002Z

1. The Bloop

Okay, I can find nothing on this one at all. It's an undersea noise recorded in the Pacific in 1997 and it remains unexplained. It sounds, to me, like a bubble. Perhaps a large clathrate collapse. To date, it has not been assigned any official explanation at all. Chthulu is fiction. Let's not even start on that one.

The most interesting thing about this one, aside from its inexplicability, is that it's not the only unexplained sound to come out of the ocean. Some very strange noises have been recorded.

Some are available here, with whale sounds, boats, volcanoes and earthquakes for comparison.

If your name is Julia, beware. Davy Jones is calling for you.

Visiting the unknown.

2011-03-03T00:33:00.003Z

There have been many tales of those who have clinically died, been brought back and who have described either an afterlife or the attempts to resuscitate them as seen from another part of the room. Sometimes both.

Where someone describes the scene around their 'dead' body, there are things that can be verified. Things that were said and done, things that others saw happening, can be checked. The sceptical view must always be - were they really unconscious all the time? They might believe they were, but did they pick up a spoken word here and there? While these cases can be verified, they can't be absolute proof as long as that shred of doubt exists.

Anything concerning the afterlife is easily dismissed by the sceptics even when multiple cases describe the same thing. They could have read about those other cases, they might be based on the same set of beliefs, and since the person survived they obviously didn't 'cross over'. Such cases don't constitute proof, only evidence.

What we need are more cases like this one.

Scepticism alert - the family are trying to make money from a book based on the story. It's not really enough for a book, it's just a case study and only one aspect of it really matters. The descriptions of heaven, of sitting on Jesus' knee, of God and angels, are all things that could have come from the boy's Christian upbringing. I'm not saying he imagined them, I'm saying we can't use any of that as evidence for anything.

Book-hype notwithstanding, the one interesting aspect of this case is that the boy said he met his dead sister while he was 'dead'. Not remarkable in itself but when you take into account that this boy was four years old and that his sister died in a miscarriage a year before he was born, then it does get very interesting.

The parents say the boy had no knowledge of his mother's miscarriage and there is no reason to disbelieve what they say. Dead babies are not a normal topic of conversation between parents and four-year-olds. It would be a macabre family indeed who would discuss a miscarried baby with such a young child. Indeed, few people who experience such trauma wish to speak of it at all.

So I, for one, fully accept that the parents did not tell the boy about his dead sister. His meeting with her ghost might well be real and it is certainly far more convincing than any description of an afterlife none of us have seen. There is only one way to test such descriptions and I'm in no hurry.

However (yes, there's always a 'however') there is one tiny detail that cracks this otherwise amazing story.

As I said, I believe the parents never told the boy about his miscarried sister. Could he, though, have overheard them talking about it at any point? Could that information have crept into his mind without even him realising what he was hearing? It's not impossible. His parents wouldn't know so their statement that they didn't tell him is still true.

It's often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but that's not really true. What's needed is not extraordinary evidence but absolutely unbreakable evidence. It can be mundane, such as the location of a particular key, or a password known only to the deceased, but it must be absolutely impossible for anyone still living to get hold of that information without direct contact with the dead.

In this case, it seems highly likely that the boy genuinely didn't know about his dead sister before his own unfortunate experience, but there is that nagging shred of possibility that he might have, and that is enough to break the proof. It's one small hole that a determined sceptic can get a finger into, and from there they'll tear the story apart. The only way to produce proof is to have no holes at all.

There is another explanation that does not involve an afterlife, but sceptics won't like this either. When I was young, I always had the feeling that someone was missing. That there should be more family than those I saw around me (even though there were already more than I felt able to cope with). Something was missing. I even mentioned it to my mother at one point and she brushed it off with 'Don't be silly'.

Years later, many years, I found out about the adoption. Not mine. Hers. My mother had been adopted and had eight brothers and sisters, who she later contacted. There was a lot more family after all - in fact I had been right through school with one of my cousins and never known!

Family ties are stronger than science can ever realise. It might be that the boy knew at some subconscious level that someone was missing. Couple that with an overheard snippet of conversation and then put his mind in a calm, resting state with anaesthetic and he could have worked it out. Dreams would do the rest.

So it's not proof. It is, however, compelling evidence, even though we can find a few possible holes in it. It's a step closer to proof and that's good enough for now.

Naturally, some who call themselves sceptics are actually cynics who would refuse to accept any evidence at all, even if they met a ghost themselves. Those are beyond the reach of logic and research and can be ignored. There is no point banging our heads on brick walls.

This case, though, is very interesting indeed, possibly unique. Many have met parents and other relatives in these experiences but they have always known of the existence and death of those relatives beforehand. This is, I think, the first description of meeting a dead sibling the subject didn't know existed.

That is a very big step forward.

Interesting things - 5.

2011-03-02T23:37:00.002Z

2. The Baghdad Batteries.

This one is particularly fascinating because they genuinely look like batteries and can, using electrolytes that would have been easily available at the time, generate a voltage.

Not much of a voltage. About what you'd get from a standard dry cell these days, around 1-3 volts. So, the idea that they were used to power 2000-year-old arc lights is, let's say 'unlikely' to be generous. Especially as no arc lights, nor indeed any kind of electric light, has been found.

There is a theory that they were used to electroplate metals, but no contemporary electroplated metal has turned up. Another theory was that they were used as some kind of joke-buzzer by priests to persuade their flock that there really was power in the statues of their gods. Again, no wired-up statue, nor indeed any wires at all, have shown up.

What do I think? Well, suppose, two thousand years from now, someone uncovered my laboratory. There are all kinds of gadgets in there, some of which have proved to be no use at all. However, maybe in two thousand years, one of those devices actually does do something and is then in common use. Those archaeologists might wonder 'How did that Crowe chap come up with this? Was he two thousand years ahead of his time? Why, this machine looks like a crude defibcombulator, a common household appliance these days.'

The truth would be that I have no idea what a defibcombulator might be nor what it does. I have no idea why anything would need defibcombulating nor what anyone might want to defibcombulate. I just made this interesting thing, found no use for it and put it to one side as 'something that might be useful one day'.

Now go back two thousand years to a scientist in Baghdad. He has access to copper, iron, clay pots and acidic electrolytes such as grape juice, wine and vinegar. He has access, therefore, to everything he needs to build a battery. While playing around, as scientists used to do before politics took over, he gives himself a little electric shock from some wine-covered metals.

'Oh,' he thinks. 'That was interesting.' So he sets about building a device to replicate that mild shock. Now he has a battery - but he has no radio, no phone, no TV, not even a light bulb. He has no actual use for the device he has built. It's just an interesting thing that he'd put to one side as 'something that might be useful one day'.

At that time, it might not have occurred to the scientist that the electricity he generated could be transported from his battery to somewhere else along a strip of metal. Why would it? He had nothing to power with this new device, and nobody had thought to build anything. Besides, it would soon run out of charge and need replenishing so to the minds of the time, it would have been just an interesting thing with no practical application.

So we have batteries but no wires, and no evidence they were ever used for anything. I think they really were batteries. I think they were the product of an enquiring mind but abandoned as being of no practical use.

What they found in Baghdad was that cupboard all scientists have, where we store things that don't actually do anything useful but which look interesting.

Interesting things - 4.

2011-02-26T02:39:00.002Z

3. The Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica.

Huge carved stone balls, some six feet wide, litter the ground of parts of Costa Rica. In a world where humans have built Stonehenge, the pyramids and the carved heads of Easter Island, do these even need any explanation?

There is a quarry, some fifty miles from where some of the stones were found. How did they get there? Well, I would suggest that if you have several tons of rock, moving it from one place to another would be difficult if it was shaped like the rectangles of Stonehenge, the heads of Easter Island or the shaped blocks of the Egyptian or Inca pyramids. Stonehenge's bluestones, in particular, were moved hundreds of miles from their source to the place of construction.

By comparison, moving a stone shaped like a sphere would be a simple job indeed.

How were they cut so accurately? Actually, they aren't perfect spheres although they look pretty impressive to the eye. To check them for roundness during construction, all you need is a critical eye and a length of rope. Put the rope around the rock, note the length, put it around in a different direction and if it's a different length, it's not a sphere yet. More chipping away required.

The amount of chipping, and the fussiness of the builder, might explain why some of those balls are quite small. Some carvers just couldn't stop until it was exactly right.

In a society where nobody has access to laser-sighting equipment and giant calipers, a ball that looks round is good enough to impress the neighbours.

And that, most likely, is what they were for. Humanity hasn't changed all that much. Now it's all about who has the biggest, newest, fastest car or the latest fashionable shoes or the right logos on their T-shirts. People were no different in the old days. On Easter Island they competed for the most ornate stone head. In Egypt, the Pharaohs tried to out-do previous pharaohs with a bigger or more internally complex pyramid. In the UK, one village put up a carved rock, the next village put up a bigger one, the next put up a circle, the next placed huge rocks on top of other huge rocks... and in Costa Rica, they made bigger, rounder stone balls and moved them further than their neighbours.

I mean, really. Aliens? An alien race goes to all the trouble, time and expense to cross the vast gulf of space, makes some huge granite marbles and goes home again? Seriously?

Look at sculptors, ancient and modern. Many living sculptors could produce such a stone ball now, and with modern tools they could make a bigger and rounder one than any in Costa Rica.

These are interesting ancient artefacts. Whether they were part of some religious rite or just the ancient equivalent of garden gnomes, we'll never know. However, they were made by people.

No mystery here at all.

Interesting things - 3.

2011-02-23T03:31:00.002Z

4. The Baigong Pipes.

I thought this one would be a challenge, but it's not.

Years ago, I visited Beijing and spent some time at the university there. What struck me about the library was that they had every English language journal available - but the same amount of books in Chinese. I couldn't read Chinese so I could only access half of that library's contents. I was forced to conclude that the students there must know twice as much as me.

All we know about China is what comes out of there translated. In the case of these mysterious pipes, all that seems to be available is one newspaper report.

However, someone with the time and inclination to press this particular matter further has found that the Chinese do, in fact, know exactly what these pipes are.

Fossilised tree casts. Yes, they are palaeontological, not paranormal.

Next.

Interesting things - 2.

2011-02-23T02:48:00.002Z

5. The Antikythera mechanism.

This was fished out of the sea many years ago and appears to be a device so complex that it's often said that nobody could have made it at the time.

Evidently, someone did.

There are people in the world today who could start from a sheet of brass and make an accurate watch mechanism. Not very many, but there are some. Nowadays few would bother because many of the cogs and wheels are already available as mass-produced parts, but armed with a few simple tools and a lot of time and skill, it could still be done.

It accurately charts the planets, the moon (including correcting for the moon's elliptical orbit) and performs a whole range of astronomical calculations. All of them accurately. So, is it some mysterious time-travel artefact or a design passed on by aliens?

At the time it was built, astrology was a very serious matter indeed. A device that could accurately predict what the sun, moon and planets would do in the future was a highly desirable thing. It would be something that someone, possibly royalty, would pay a lot of money for. Therefore it was certainly worth some skilled artisan's time to cut all those cogs and gears and make sure the whole device worked.

How did he predict the moon and planetary movements? He didn't. He observed them and replicated the movements in his device. Since each object follows a predictable path, the historical data available to the device's maker would extrapolate very nicely into future data. All he had to do was make sure it gave accurate results for any point in the past, and it would give accurate results for any point in the future.

Easy? Certainly not. Planets don't follow neat circles around the sky, certainly not when seen from Earth. Sometimes they even appear to go backwards for a time. Getting all that into the machine would need a lot of cogs and wheels and that's exactly what this device has.

It was made by someone exceptionally clever, highly skilled and who had time and resources to do it. Most likely it was commissioned by someone very rich, someone who could keep the maker employed solely on this job.

Are there others? Well, you wouldn't pay someone on the promise that they could make something unless you'd seen previous work. So simpler mechanisms were probably produced along the way. As this site says, the Antikythera mechanism contains no errors so it's likely there were prototypes.

Why haven't we found any? Consider how long it takes to cut one accurate cog starting from a sheet of metal. When you have a prototype but need to change some things, you keep all the parts you've made that already work. I'd say the prototypes were most likely cannibalised for parts so the chances of finding one of them will be very slim now.

As for it being the only one, well, it would have taken many years to get this one right and there was no such thing as mass production. It might well have been the only one ever made, especially if the maker or his rich sponsor hid or destroyed the plans and prototypes. Having the only accurate planet-predictor would have been a very powerful thing in those days.

I don't see anything supernatural or inexplicable in this device. It's fascinating, certainly, but it's not beyond the bounds of human ability for the time. All it would need was the backing of a rich sponsor. It would also take someone most of a lifetime to get it right, so finding only one isn't a surprise either.

So it's not inexplicable at all.

The next one might be.

Interesting things - 1.

2011-02-21T03:31:00.003Z

There is a site that lists interesting and often amusing things. It's a little on the, well, a lot on the sweary side in many cases. In fact, it reaches the level that used to be called 'profane' in more religious days.

Nonetheless, the information it carries is interesting and it does a good job of pulling togetther collections of related items. Sometimes strongly related and sometimes tenuously, but always there's a link.

One of the collections is 'Six insane discoveries that science can't explain'. Well, let's have a go. They list the things in reverse order so we start with number six.

6. The Voynich manuscript.

Only one copy of this exists and you'll need to get special permission to view it. It's unlikely you'll be allowed to touch it, an attendant with white cotton gloves will turn the pages for you, and as for slapping it on a photocopier, forget it. There is a book about this book, called (predictably) 'The Voynich Manuscript', by Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, 2004, Orion books, London. I have a copy of that book.

So can science explain the Voynich manuscript? Looking at the images in that book and reading the arguments put forward, I would say yes. Science can't translate it, but we can take a good stab at explaining it. There are images of castles and of people dressed in mediaeval style. There are images of crowns, one at least very similar in design to the English royal crown. It is not a mysterious grimoire from the dawn of time, its origin might go as far back as Roger Bacon (mid to late 1200s) but is more likely the creation of Dr. John Dee with the help of Edward Kelley in the 1580s.

Why can't we translate it? First, it's not written in any known (modern or extinct) alphabet. It does not decode into any known language. It might be gibberish or it might be an entirely invented language, much like the modern attempt at Esperanto in Europe.

Not translating it does not equate to an inability to explain it. Currently, it looks like an elaborate fake designed to con gullible rich people out of large amounts of cash. Edward Kelley, at least, was known to be particularly good at that.

I'll look at the others in separate posts, otherwise this is going to turn into a very long essay.

The Merchant of Green Death.

2011-02-10T23:59:00.005Z

New Scientist, 5th February 2011, issue 2798, page 27. Article 'One minute with Lester Brown'.

This is a man banging on about climate change but whose background is in agriculture and economics. He is no more qualified in climate modelling and weather prediction than I am, and I am not.

His argument on the issues facing water supplies are perfectly correct. Taking water from underground aquifers faster than they are replenished will, most definitely, lead to severe problems in the future. That, I agree with absolutely and based on his qualifications in agriculture and economics, I fully accept his timescales for the future problems.

However, this has nothing at all to do with climate change, whether man-made, natural, or due to comet strike or dancing medicine men. The forthcoming water shortages are caused by people pumping water from wells faster than it drains into those wells. The climate is irrelevant.

Nonetheless, he uses this to demand a restructuring of the world economy along his lines and to demand we all (well, not him personally of course) return to mediaeval life for the sake of the climate. He ends with this:

It's about becoming politically active. If there's a coal-fired power station near you, organise to close it down.

They've already tried. The unwashed, uneducated drones who follow the new religion of the Green God have tried to shut down a power station. They will succeed one day.

When they do, all those life-support machines, baby incubators, kidney dialysis, monitoring equipment, in every hospital, will stop working. Just like that. No warning. No backup. They just stop.

In windowless operating theatres where patients lie with some part or other of their innards exposed, the lights will go out and the anaesthetic machinery will stop working. You want to imagine something really horrible? Imagine waking in the dark surrounded by the sound of panicking people and realising your abdomen is open and it hurts.

In every pensioner's home, in every nursery, the heat will go off. Lights too. All security systems will be inoperative, all street lights off, all those CCTV cameras will be dead and it won't take the criminals long to work out what that means.

Even if you have gas central heating, the controller and the pumps are electric. They won't work either.

Try to leave town, and find that the pumps that put petrol in your car are electric. You won't get far.

This is the scenario that the Green God's followers want to bring to reality. They have the full support of Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

Science has become a dangerous fascist entity. To Science, we are just statistics, not human beings. If they get their way there will be a cull. Science, like religion, cannot be trusted with politics. They are too convinced of their own Righteousness.

How will they decide who to cull? It would be difficult unless there was some way to collect everyone's DNA and catalogue it. Then, Science can dispassionately decide who is useless.

The irony is, most of those unwashed Green eco-warriors are certain to be on the list.

Rollerspook.

2011-02-08T01:11:00.002Z

Work on a new roller-coaster has stirred up some ghostly activity. Hardly surprising since they were digging fifty-foot foundation holes in an area that was well frequented even in the seventh century. There must have been a lot of travellers killed on that road over such a long time.

The park officials called in experts who stated, through their claimed paranormal contacts, that the ride was on the site of an ancient burial ground. The experts went on to say that they captured a lot more orbs at the site than at other nearby spots. For me, that was a major groan time.

Orbs are dust. This has been demonstrated over and over and over. I've demonstrated it myself. They are reflections picked up by digital cameras which can see infrared. You'd expect a lot more dust, and therefore more orbs, at a building site than on undisturbed ground nearby. It's not rocket science and it's not paranormal science either. My faith in these experts was severely shaken as soon as they came out with the O-word.

And yet they correctly identified the burial ground. Ah, but...

The ride's foundations would have been over 15m (49ft) deep in an area of the theme park where stone coffins have previously been excavated.

The burial ground was already documented. Nil points for that one. Identify a previously unidentified burial ground and be proved right, and you're in business. Identify a known burial site and you're going to get laughed at.

The ghosts, however, are likely to be genuine. They were convincing enough for the entire ride to be moved to another site because the builders refused to work there. I can't see what the builders would gain from having to start all over again somewhere else since they've likely been contracted for a fixed price for the job. They wouldn't do it for fun. They can't negotiate a new price since the builders, not the park owners, wanted the thing moved.

What interests me most of all is that if the builders routinely saw ghosts at the site, why did the 'experts' content themselves with blurry dust photos? Where are the names and the faces of these ghosts? Where is, at the least, a sense of whether these ghosts were angry, distressed, or just interested in what was going on?

'Expert' doesn't seem to mean what it used to.

Oh, and headless ghosts are not necessarily ghosts of the beheaded. Close your eyes and imagine yourself. You can picture your body, arms and legs easily because you see them every day. It's harder to picture your head because that's where your eyes are.

Now imagine you had to manifest as a spirit. You can check your arms and legs are in the right place but you have no way to tell if you've manifested your head at all.

'Headless' can mean no more than 'Well, I thought it was there...'

A darker shade of green.

2011-02-05T01:54:00.002Z

All those windmills, all standing on massive eco-disaster concrete blocks, all needing eco-disaster paved roads for access by eco-disaster diesel trucks carrying eco-disaster steel and synthetic spare parts, all of them are the twinkle in the swivelling eye of every Green lunatic.

They are good for the environment, you see. They use marvellous neodymium magnets which boosts their efficiency to the point where they might one day compete with tallow candles and dried cow faeces as fuel. One day.

Neodymium is a 'rare earth' metal. That does not mean it's scarce. It means that, unlike commonly available metals, it does not occur in handy seams of ore. It's scattered in tiny bits all over the planet. China produces most of it at the moment but that is not because China has all the reserves. The stuff is everywhere.

It's because China is the only country that will stand for what happens when you extract neodymium. For the magnets in the windmills.

It's good for the environment, we are told.

The Chinese people might not quite agree.

Greens, welcome to the dark side of your religion.

Ghost Revival.

2011-01-29T01:08:00.003Z

Most British people think it is possible to communicate with the dead. This is especially remarkable because very few believe it is possible to communicate with a living politician. Perhaps we'd have better luck if they were dead. It must surely be worth a try.

Even so, it's encouraging news, even if many of those 'believers' are determined to talk to Princess Diana, an ex-member of the Royal Family and hardly someone you'd expect to chat to at the supermarket checkout.

Why does everyone think that talking to the dead involves a fireside rumination with royalty or an ectoplasmic flirtation with Marylin Monroe? Just as in real life, most dead people are commoners and some are downright bores. One thing that would alert me to the possibility of a fake psychic is the apparent ability to call up famous dead people at will. Or indeed, the ability to call up anyone. That's not mediumship, that's necromancy and that's nasty.

One thing I would really like to try is to get two of the most obviously fake psychics and send them a client each. Those clients would ask the fakes to call up the same ghost at the same time. Obviously, the fakes won't be in on the game.

I'll bet they'll both get a result and I'll bet the ghost, while appearing at two locations simultaneously, will also exhibit two completely different characters. I will further bet that neither fake will hear from this ghost that he/she is being called away to another sitting. Have you ever seen that happen on TV?

No real psychic can claim 100% success. No real psychic can call up just the right number of spirits to fill a TV programme week after week with never a blank spot and never a random spirit who isn't involved with anyone in the room. No real psychic would ever call up any spirit at all, they would just have to deal with whoever turned up. Real psychics can learn to shut them out but never to force an appearance of a specific spirit. Fakes annoy me.

All the same, it is encouraging to find that I am not working in a totally disparaged field. There are those who laugh and dismiss the entire subject, but there always have been and always will be.

It's nice to know they are not the majority.

Granny wins again.

2011-01-26T03:58:00.002Z

My grandmother was a fount of wisdom, usually delivered with a scowl and a clip around the ear. Then again, I was never short of comics or pocket money. A fearsome woman, short and square and apparently made of ill-tempered brick, but when it came to family she knew which side to take.

Stung by nettles? Crush dockleaf and rub it in. Gut problems? Apples. If she resorted to pharmaceuticals, it went as far as calamine lotion, kaolin and morphine or aspirin. No further.

One treatment for warts was the sap from dandelions. Snap off the flower and the white exudate would kill a wart. Incidentally, dandelion flowers make good wine, the leaves are good in salads and the roots can be eaten boiled or fried. Don't be too hasty with that weedkiller.

Science is catching up with Grandma. They have now found that non-melanoma skin cancers (warts) can be cured with topical application of milkweed sap. Somewhere in the spirit world, Grandma is administering an ectoplasmic smack across the head to a scientist. She knew about that years ago.

The odd thing about science is that when you read about marvellous cures for this and that, they involve some exotic Polynesian fruit or rare Transylvanian herb. Blueberries and cranberries abound in these papers, as do kiwi fruit and starfruit and yams. One fruit they ignore, in all cases, is the humble apple.

I did test them. Since testing them I have planted two apple trees in my garden. Draw your own conclusions.

The arrogance of modern science and medicine is leading to their downfall. The 'five-a-day' fruit and vegetable recommendation, or the '21 units of alcohol' limit for example - have you seen the research from which these figures were derived? I can state with absolute confidence that you have not. There was no research. Both figures were simply made up.

Now, the most effective way of leaving tobacco ever invented is to be banned on the lack of understanding displayed by an idiot:

Democrat Linda Rosenthal, or the New York Assembly, said: 'I got interested in this because I saw all these ads for e-cigarettes, so I did some research.

'I found what is in the e-cigarettes is a mystery.'

She didn't do very much research. Every electrosmoking website I've seen details exactly what's in them. Water and propylene glycol or glycerol (common and safe food additives) for the 'smoke', flavouring of all kinds and nicotine. The nicotine is optional. I have zero-nicotine electrosmoking fluid that works, for me, just as well. The addiction story is, and always has been, nonsense.

It's going to be banned to protect the interests of the pharmaceutical companies selling patches and gum and to keep tobacco revenues pouring in. If you live in New York and vote for these people, you are voting to keep smokers on tobacco because the patches and gum have never worked and never will. Electrosmoking does work. If you like being surrounded by smokers, vote for Linda Rosenthal. If you think smokers should get a safer alternative that produces no ash, butts or smell, vote that idiot out at the first opportunity.

There is no science any more. Rely on Granny because those who claim to 'know best' cannot be trusted. They have been proven to be just making up their results, time and again.

Now they are claiming credit for knowledge Granny learned from her own Granny.

That's just despicable.

Goodbye Orion.

2011-01-22T01:47:00.003Z

In the northern UK, we see the constellation Orion in its entirety in winter. It is one of the few we can consistently identify, along with Cassiopea (the 'Big 'W') and Ursus Major (the 'Great Bear' or the 'Big Dipper') Both can be used to find the Pole Star, Polaris, and there was a time, not so long ago but before widespread computer use, when we were taught how to do this in school.

The top left star, Betelgeuse, has entered popular imagination through the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the spooky-fun film 'Beetlejuice'. Not everyone knows how to find it but there are few who can say they have never heard the name.

Betelgeuse is an old star, a red giant, and is close to its own personal boom-day. When it goes it is likely to produce a supernova bright enough to be seen by day. There is nothing to fear in this, the star is 650 light years away so we won't get much in the way of dangerous radiation or debris coming our way. We will get an awful lot of visible light though.

Astronomers say it might happen as soon as next year. What they are actually saying is that they think it might have happened 649 years ago and the light will arrive next year. Then again, it might not happen for a long time yet. It's not easy to be sure with these things.

Part of me hopes it goes nova during my lifetime. I'd like to see that. Another part of me would prefer not to see the end of Orion. It's one of the easiest constellations to identify.

It's an important one, because the three stars of the belt point to the rising of the sun, three days after its apparent demise at the winter solstice. These three, known as the 'three kings' in many cultures, are the three kings that follow the rebirth of the Sun.

I'm not going to get into that now. I just hope to see a supernova and simultaneously hope it doesn't wreck one of the most easily-found constellations for those of us who are not astronomers.

A supernova in Canis Minor would be better. I can never find that one anyway.

Dr. Crippen's Corpse.

2011-01-16T21:45:00.002Z

The UK abandoned capital punishment in the 1960's. You won't get hanged for murder here, instead you are likely to get a stern ticking-off and maybe a prison sentence that you'll serve about half of. Seems to me as if it's gone a bit too far the other way, but that's what we have now.

I am not a supporter of capital punishment for one reason - what if the wrong person is convicted and killed? If the wrong person is imprisoned, you can let them out and compensate them for the error. If they're dead, well, 'sorry' doesn't really help.

It has happened in the past and it seems it happened in one of the more famous murder trials of the last century. Dr. Crippen was hanged for the murder of his wife and always protested his innocence.Rather than being a famous murder case, it seems it was in fact a famous miscarriage of justice.

Some things about the case still don't quite fit. There is mention of a 'headless corpse', then a piece of flesh, shown to the court, which had a scar. This was given as evidence that the flesh came from Mrs. Crippen and on that, Dr. Crippen was convicted and hanged.

DNA testing now reveals the flesh to have been male. If it came from that headless corpse, couldn't they tell? Only the head was missing. Did Victorian morals extend to the post mortem room, with the body fully clothed throughout the investigation? Somebody must have noticed whether the corpse, head or no, was male or female.

There is also the matter of this corpse. It was found in the cellar, minus head, so someone was murdered. Nobody cuts off their own head and then hides it. It also means that someone was a murderer. It does not mean it was Dr. Crippen who did this, nor that Mrs. Crippen was the corpse. There was, however, a murder carried out by someone at the premises.

In law, that's beside the point. Dr. Crippen was convicted on the basis of false evidence. He was not accused of killing a man so the presentation of a bit of male flesh was not evidence that he killed his wife. If the cellar corpse was male, then it was evidently not his wife, yet he was convicted of killing his wife.

Whether he was responsible for the cellar corpse is neither here nor there. If it was never proved that the corpse was his wife, he should not have been convicted of her murder. As to what really happened, once he had been hanged, there was nobody who could say.

So it seems the death of Dr. Crippen was a miscarriage of justice, and one that could never be put right no matter what new evidence came to light. That gives investigators a very strong incentive to cover up any new evidence that might prove they were wrong, and that is not a good basis for a fair justice system.

There are cases where a death penalty would be appropriate, such as the Yorkshire Ripper case which concluded without a shred of doubt that Peter Sutcliffe was guilty. However, I would never support a return of the death penalty because it will be wrongly used. We already hear of cases where the wrong man was locked up, and who is then released and compensated. That can't happen if the wrong man goes to the gallows.

If one of the more famous murder convictions was based on unreliable, maybe even false evidence, then how certain can we be of the reliability of the courts? They do get things wrong sometimes and that's because they are human. It's no shame to admit to being human and making mistakes now and then.

Unless that mistake has caused someone to be executed.

A new Zodiac recruit.

2011-01-15T00:04:00.003Z

Apparently there's a new Zodiac sign. It seems the Earth has shifted around since astrology was first conceived and the Sun no longer goes through the right signs at the right times. In fact, there's a constellation it goes through now that it didn't go through before. Ophiuchus, the snake-wrestler.

The new list is as follows.

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11
Pisces: March 11-April 18
Aries: April 18-May 13
Taurus: May 13-June 21
Gemini: June 21-July 20
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29-Dec. 17
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20

I thought I was Aries but now it seems I'm completely Pisces. Which I deny. I haven't touched a drop today. I despise being in water as much as a cat does, I can barely swim and I am uncomfortable on boats. A fish-sign does not suit me at all. I prefer to stick with Aries the Ram because the idea of being able to head-butt people without feeling any need to give any kind of explanation is very appealing indeed.

Does anyone know where this stellar image of a giant guy waving his serpent around came from? I am not a student of astrology so maybe he's been in the picture all this time and I haven't noticed. Although I have to say I have never heard the name at all.

This new list comes from astronomers rather than astrologers so I have no idea of the impact (if any) it has on astrology. Does it change things retrospectively? Am I Aries because it was still Aries when I was born, or do I have to go out and get Pisces now? This is more confusing than when they demoted Pluto from 'planet' to 'big rock'. At least Pluto didn't change its orbit in response.

I wonder what the character traits for Ophiuchus people will be. A propensity for shaking your snake at people, or perhaps the ability to recognise and strangle the slimy people. That could be useful.

We'll have to wait and see whether this new sign works its way into astrology. I'm sure it will mean a lot of books will have to be rewritten.

It'll be interesting to see what effect this has. I'm sure the astronomers plan to use this to say 'Nyah, you're wrong' to the astrologers, but won't they be kicking themselves if the adjustment turned out to make astrology much more accurate?

That would be worth seeing.

Peering over the keyboard.

2011-01-04T01:36:00.003Z

This wretched holiday refuses to end.

In Scotland, both the first and second of January are holidays because the Scots New Year parties mean most people need both days for recovery. This year, those dates fell on Saturday and Sunday, but they apparently don't count. So everything is still shut down for Monday and Tuesday.

Reality does not descend until Wednesday. It's going to happen again next year.

I need a new chair. This one is broken. The gas-lift plunger has popped out of the bottom so it's at minimum height and staying there. If I had a webcam now I would look like an enraged gnome. I have ordered another but it won't even be dispatched before Wednesday.

Bah. Humbug. Scrooge was right all along.

New Year.

2011-01-02T01:36:00.002Z

Wel, that's this holiday period nearly over. I expect the shops will be stocked with Easter eggs when they reopen on Tuesday.

I'll be glad when it gets back to normal on the High Street. I am in desperate need of a haircut.

So begins 2011. As always, everyone considers it a new year and imagines it will somehow be different. There are those who believe the world will end when the Mayan calendar ends on December 12th 2012. Well, our calendar just ended again and the planet didn't even notice.

The Mayan calendar is a long one but it has ended before and when it ends this time, it just goes back to the beginning again. As ours does. So I don't expect anything to happen in December 2012.

Well, there will be one event of note in 2012. There will be one second of time where clocks that display seconds will read 12:12:12 on 12/12/12. A small amusement, just as this year they read, for one second, 10:10:10 on 10/10/10 and there'll be one next November too. After the 2012 one, these little amusements won't be available again until the year 3000 and I, for one, am not confident about being here to see that.

As for resolutions, I don't really have any. I need to lose the weight I've gained by sitting around snowbound for a month but that's a necessity, not a resolution. I hope to revive this neglected blog this year and get back to the expanded version of 'Ghosthunting' which has also been neglected.

We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I hope the year turns out to be a good one for everyone.

Happy New Year.

Missing datapoint.

2010-12-24T22:07:00.002Z

Every year at this time I visit a local haunting and try to get photos. Last year looked promising and I had hoped to build on it this year.

However, I chickened out this year. Temperatures here have been well below freezing, even during the day, and once the sun goes down the frost is severe. It's not forecast to reach above zero until Tuesday. So I have a missing datapoint but then it would have been impossible to hold a camera steady at these temperatures anyway. It's disappointing but the site will still be there next year, and it might not be quite so devastatingly cold next time.

I'm keen to photograph this haunting event but I'm not keen to become part of it.

Apparently this freezing weather is caused by global warming. It seems the alleged scientists involved think we have no memories, because the run of mild winters we had a few years ago were also caused by global warming. We were in fact told that we could expect to see no snow at all in the UK in the future, and we'd all be growing grape vines and Kiwi fruit. Last summer I struggled to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse!

So, if it gets warmer, that's global warming. If it gets colder, that's global warming. If we get a summer drought, that's global warming and if we get summer floods, that's global warming. It seems that if we get any weather at all, it's global warming.

If you doubt that anything and everything is global warming, you are a climate heretic and must be silenced. If you accept that no matter what happens, it's all global warming, you are allowed to consider yourself 'scientifically literate' even though you are self-evidently a deranged lunatic who will accept exactly the same explanation for diametrically opposite events.

When this country is under a kilometre of ice, rest assured that it will be due to global warming and heating will still be frowned upon.

'Weather is not climate' is the mantra these morons spout. Unless, of course, it's a weather event that supports the idea of global warming. Then it's climate. Any weather event is global warming. The explanation comes first, the observation must then be made to fit. This is what passes for science now. Alchemists were far more rigorous.

I'm glad I no longer teach science. Current standards have fallen so far, I'd be castigated for having unreasonable expectations of students.

You see, I wouldn't let them just make it all up.

Anyway, Merry Christmas. Time to get the whisky out.

Busy day tomorrow.

2010-12-20T20:22:00.002Z

There are a few things happening tomorrow. It's the Winter Solstice and it's also a total lunar eclipse. The eclipse starts at 6:30 am GMT and is visible from the UK. I'm not sure how good it will look from other parts of the globe but I think Eastern parts of North America might get a good view. In fact, I'm a little late with this because Americans will see it in the early hours of the 21st.

Here, the moon will be setting as it goes into eclipse and the sun will be just starting to rise. The last time this happened was in 1638. The years following it saw the English civil war, the Great Plague, the Witchfinders, the beheading of King Charles and finished with the Great Fire of London in 1666. So it wasn't a good omen, really. Fortunately we don't currently have a King Charles, so let's hope the Queen is in extraordinarily good health.

I hope to see the eclipse, but it's full cloud cover at the moment. It doesn't look promising.

Forest ghoul?

2010-12-17T01:32:00.003Z

(Picture found here)

This made the rounds of UK newspapers a few days ago. It is allegedly a picture taken by an American hunter in Louisiana.

One commenter on the story says it's an advert for a computer game and cites the bottom-left tag 'Wildgame Innovations' as evidence. Nope. Wildgame Innovations is a hunting supplies company, not a games manufacturer. The picture appears under their 'success stories' listing, is taken using an infrared camera and was put there by someone who says it was taken by 'a friend of a friend'.

I am unconvinced.

First, if you were alone in the woods on a dark night, equipped for hunting, and that came at you - what would you grab first? The camera or the gun? I mean, it doesn't look as if that thing wants a conversation, does it?

Second, look at the arms. Huge shoulders with thin arms poking out of them. The musculature makes no sense. Its right arm has straight bones, its left arm has rubber bones. The right leg appears to be much thicker than the left.

My suspicion is that it was a photo that included an interestingly shaped object, perhaps a fallen branch, and that the head was added later. Or maybe it's a totally digital image.

Real? Not impossible, but I'd rate this as having no more than a 5% chance of being real. A second photo would improve that rating, preferably by someone completely unrelated to the first photographer.

Unknown large animals are certainly possible. There are many wild places on the planet where nobody ever goes. In recent years, a new species of ape has been found in Africa and it's only a few decades since the discovery of the giant and colossal squid species.

The thing in the picture, though, looks to have such odd musculature that it would be unlikely to thrive in woodlands. Its arms don't have enough muscle to be much use, it appears to have no fur or scales, its teeth don't look very big and its jaw isn't strong enough to rip through much of anything.

So, for now, I'd file this as 'not very likely at all'.

Unless someone else from Louisiana has seen one?

Something for the Greens.

2010-12-02T23:22:00.002Z

Two feet of snow and still falling. The earliest snowfall in twenty years, the deepest snow since 1965, the country is once again almost entirely white when seen from space and it looks like this weather is staying for a long while yet. There are icicles hanging off everything and the temperature is not getting above freezing during the day. Tonight it's due to hit -20C (-4F).

Still, we hear about all this global warming. We hear about the less than one degree of increased temperature in the Arctic over the last decade and we keep hearing that Arctic ice is melting.

Well, followers of the Green God of Climatology, here's what they are not telling you.

It has nothing to do with the climate. Nothing to do with 4x4 cars or people flying around in planes or anything else we do. You have been duped and you have demonstrated and demanded tax increases because you were told to.

Now, the cost of heating is to go up again. Last year over 20,000 pensioners died in the winter in the UK because they could not afford heating. So, Greens, are you trying to top that this year?

You'll be pensioners one day. You might regret your zeal in disposing of the elderly by then.

Double standards.

2010-11-29T20:05:00.002Z

I've already mentioned the study on precognition that looks remarkably well done. Last week's New Scientist (issue dated 20 Nov 2010) mentioned it too, in dismissive terms. The scientific world's analysis of any such study is 'It simply cannot be' and that's the end of it. The New Scientist editorial goes so far as to claim that investigators set up some kind of magical sensory adaptation in volunteers with half a ping pong ball taped over each eye, and white noise in the ears.

In fact, those conditions are used to be certain that the subject could not have heard or seen anything that might clue them in to what they were supposed to receive telepathically. Far from being a magical ritual set up by investigators, they are a response to the scientific world's insistence that the experimental procedures are absolutely cheat-proof.

Yet now, these methodologies, brought in as a result of mainstream insistence, are held up as proof of the lunacy of paranormal investigation. Doublethink is everywhere these days.

Yes, we have to take special care in any investigation, not only because we are guaranteed to meet a wall of 'I don't believe it' no matter what we do, but because there are cheats out there. Lots of cheats. Some very clever ones. Some have become famous by convincing most of the world that stage magic is real magic, even after regular debunking. So yes, we have to be very careful in our methods.

Taping half-balls over eyes might seem like overkill but cheats have been known to adjust blindfolds so they can see. To have that cautionary experimentation referred to as if it is some kind of arcane ritual simply serves to demonstrate the blinkers worn by mainstream science. If they cannot find fault in that study on precognition, they will use derision and scorn to belittle the whole field.

In that same issue is an article on quantum physics, which claims to have sent particles back in time to interact with themselves. No scoffing from New Scientist here. This claim is lauded as a great breakthrough. I admit that the details of quantum physics is way over my head but having read the article twice, I cannot see where the 'back in time' part fits in. Maybe that's just me.

So, in one issue, there are two articles on, effectively, time shifting in which an event that has not yet occurred shows an effect in the present. One is considered a great breakthrough, the other is the babbling of the spooky brigade.

There is really nothing that can be done about personal prejudice. If, faced with correctly performed experiments, someone wants to resort to abuse and misrepresentation to support their preconceived notions, then why bother arguing with them? Nothing will change their minds. You might as well try to persuade the Pope to convert to Buddhism. Or bang your head on a wall.

I choose to spend my time investigating things that mainstream science simply dismisses. Will I ever persuade any of the mainstream to take any of it seriously? Probably not. It no longer matters to me. My own curiosity is the only drive I need. So, scoff away, pretend I'm not here.

The only other thing I need is some decent weather. Cold and damp might be fine for ghosts but not for me. It doesn't do much for expensive electronics either.

Just as well I don't have deadlines.

God and gods.

2010-11-20T01:16:00.003Z

I haven't been to the lab for a while. I have things to do that require me to shift my sleeping pattern away from nocturnal and it's not easy. It hasn't worked yet.

So I have had time to think. And read blogs.

I read a lot on ancient Celtic religion and other things that come under the 'Pagan' banner, as well as on modern religions. I am not religious, neither am I atheist. Pascal's wager states that belief is better than non-belief because if there is no God, it doesn't matter - but if there is, it matters a lot.

Pascal was wrong. You can't just say you believe, you either do or you don't and if there is a God, he will know. So if you don't believe, don't waste your time pretending. It's not going to work. You might as well enjoy some debauchery, drunkenness and devilment because you're going to Hell anyway. So I didn't take up Pascal's wager even though I don't have time for any of those other things.

I am not a believer. I am also not a fervent non-believer. I am an apathist. I don't care whether there is a God or not, I'm an outside observer. However, I am very interested in the reasons people believe or don't and in the structures of religions. A study conducted some time ago suggested that there was a genetic component to belief and that priests were likely to beget more priests. That's bad news if you're Catholic because your priesthood has been busy wiping out their own genetic predisposition to the priesthood. All they have now are politicians and paedophiles.

Maybe I'm looking for something, maybe I'm just curious. I don't know. One thing that came up on Tom Sheepandgoats blog led to me wondering if there was a subliminal reason I left the church in my youth. On the back wall of the church I visited were the Ten Commandments (Exodus ch. 20). The second one says 'No graven images - you worship a graven image and you're hot pitchfork fodder, matey' or words to that effect. At the front of the church was a carving of Jesus on the cross. A graven image, and we all had to bow before it. Perhaps my subconscious thought the dichotomy was just too much.

Anyway, I left faith and became a 'don't care'. Even so, my interest remained. The thought processes were fired up again by a post on Tessa Dick's blog.

What I chiefly noticed about all the other gods, Pagan, Roman, Greek, Norse, all of them (before Gerald Gardner's New Age revision of the Pagan faith) was that these gods had to be appeased rather than worshipped. There were gods of war and of storms and all sorts of nasty things and if they didn't get what they wanted, people got hurt. This was more a Mafia of gods than any sort of benevolent father figure.

The Abrahamic god structure through the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths all depended on one god (they call it by different names but it acts much the same way) who basically says 'Follow me, be nice to each other and you're in. Oh, and smite the unbeliever while you're at it.' I am, so far, unsmited but with all those religions out there it's only a matter of time. One thing the Abrahamic religions state, unlike the rest, is that their God will not whack them just for fun.

All of these trace back to something called a War in Heaven in which many angels decided they could do better than their creator and staged a takeover bid. They failed and were cast out. Not to Hell. To Earth. They weren't the first.

The best known is, of course, Lucifer but he wasn't one of those who first came down in defiance of law. Nor was he the serpent in Eden. He was still allowed into Heaven in Job's time, at least. According to the book of Enoch (not in the current Bible), it was Semjaza and eighteen others, plus many unnamed ones, who came down to Earth and took wives, giving rise to the Nephilim or giants, depending on the version you have. The Nephilim eventually died out and the angels involved were fired.

They weren't killed. Separated from their source of power they would be limited in what they could do but they were most likely still immortal. So they're still around.

Could they have set up their own godlike structures? They knew how to do it, they were trained by the best. After the heavenly war they would have been joined by many others. In Solomon's time, according to Goetia (definitely not part of the Bible, but part of Lemegeton which won't be found in any devout Christian library, although you can get it on Amazon), seventy-two of the fallen asked to endure penance so they could go home. Solomon sealed them in a brass casket and threw them into a lake beside Babylon. The Babylonians, thinking he was hiding treasure, eventually retrieved the casket and opened it and the compressed fallen angels, by now driven nuts, escaped. Shades of Pandora's Box?

What interests me is the way it all fits together. Most of the pantheistic gods can be somewhat petty at times and none of them have the omnipotence and all-over power of the one God. Each of the gods in a pantheon is a specialist. None of them - not even the leader - is all-powerful and none are omnipresent. Tales of Zeus/Jupiter producing children from human women matches Abrahamic tradition of angels - not God - doing the same. God only does this once and even then it's not absolutely certain he was the father. Nowadays he'd be paying maintenance anyway.

It's an enormous jigsaw puzzle but the pieces fit together gradually. Solomon and the seventy-two fallen angels, Pandora's box. The Nephilim, and Leda and the swan. Immortals cast to Earth with limited powers and pantheons of gods with one power each. Pantheons that come and go - Norse gods, Roman and Greek, changing names and moving to a new patch just as businesses do nowadays.

I am not convinced that this stems from a God. Before the Abrahamic religions, there was one that regarded the snake as a carrier of wisdom. It is logical, therefore, that the new religion would try to discredit the old by casting the snake in the role of deceiver. Whether that is what actually happened, thousands of years ago, is impossible to say. Nevertheless, it must be included as a possibility.

It's just that there are so many coincidences in these things. The dates of festivals are irrelevant - Easter is there to overshadow the spring equinox, Christmas to cover the winter solstice (the holly is not of Christian origin, but stems from the Pagan battle between the Holly King and the Oak King, and you are probably happier not knowing where the tree decorations originate). Even Halloween was once just Celtic New Year. There is considerable overlap in religion as the new always strives to eradicate the old.

Still, there is too much overlap to ignore. Goetia/Clavicula Salomonis and the story of Pandora do not reference each other at all. Neither do the tales of Zeus as a lusty swan and those of fallen angels taking wives. Hercules and the Nephilim. I have seen no connections made between these.

There is much in folklore and religion that should be studied seriously but is not. Science dismisses without thought far too many things that really should be examined. Sure, they might turn out to be of no importance but can we really decide that with a snort and a sneer?

Is that modern science? All too often, I fear it is.

Who saw this one coming?

2010-11-18T01:23:00.003Z

At last there has been a scientific study of premonition that was so well set up that not even the sceptics can tear it down.

There was no fault in the methodology, although nobody predicted anything really worth knowing - just which words would be chosen and where a randomly-placed picture would be. An attempt to replicate it over the internet failed, but the effect might be distance-limited so replication should really follow the format of the original experiment, with subjects in the lab. All the same, the principle is there with results well above the possibility of chance.

The scoffers are out in force as usual - but these are scoffers, not sceptics. Being sceptical is part of science. Simply sticking your fingers in your ears and saying 'I don't believe it' is not science. Sceptics check things, scoffers simply deny them.

There is a flipside to this of course, and it's the anti-sceptic statement 'the science is settled'. Real science is never settled. Science that is afraid of sceptical inquiry is science with something to hide. Like Climatology, and much of current obesity, alcohol and smoking research. So much as question it and they'll scream 'Heretic!'. The science is settled, you see, and dissent must be punished. Not answered. Punished.

What's the connection? Those who simply make pronouncements rather than bothering with all that 'reproducibility' and 'transparency' stuff are the same ones who scoff at any form of paranormal research. Yet paranormal researchers' methods have to be open and clear because there is no chance of anyone listening if the full data is not available.

Climatology refuses to release data and details of methods. Ask why, and ask why it's actually getting noticeably colder every year and you won't get a reasoned response. You'll be called a heretic.

Smoking research has long since descended into the utterly bizarre, with infections now blamed on little tobacco goblins and trace amounts of tobacco causing nonsmokers to drop dead on contact. Question it, and you'll be told the 'science' is settled and you're a heretic.

That five-a-day vegetable thing, and the alcohol units per week per adult... do you know where they came from? Have you seen the research that produced those figures? No. You haven't. There isn't any. Those figures were simply plucked out of the air and they are now Government policy. They are based on nothing at all. Reproducibility of methods and falsifiability of theory cannot be tested where none even exist. In these cases, 'science' skipped all the theory, experimentation and analysis and went straight to the conclusions. Try questioning it and see what you get.

And yet these same people will scoff at paranormal research. They accuse us of 'making it up'!

These days, paranormal research might be the only branch of science still applying proper techniques. That's something I certainly never expected to see.

Wake-up time.

2010-11-17T22:33:00.003Z

I have left this blog dormant for a long time. The weather has made outdoor investigations impossible for the last couple of years. Currently we have gales and rain and even if the ghosts were dancing in my garden, I wouldn't go out there tonight. They don't get wet or feel cold. I do, and so does my expensive camera equipment.

Lab ghost remains elusive, and in this weather the creaks, rattles and bangs in that old building mean I'd have trouble finding a banshee. Any low voices will be drowned out by howls, whistles, creaking and banging doors and rattling windows and all of it is easily discounted as being down to the wind. I wouldn't be able to prove a thing against that level of background interference.

Things are starting to liven up in the news though. There's another UFO report, although it's one of those 'black triangle' ones. They always make me think of those stealth fighters which, oddly enough, appeared a few years after the first black triangle UFOs. If the military were testing a new secret plane, they would test it at night and they certainly wouldn't admit it was anything to do with them if someone spotted it. So I am very sceptical of black triangles.

The saucer ones are more interesting. I knew that the German air force was interested in that form of flying machine during the Second World War. I was aware they had drawn up plans but I didn't know they had actually built fifteen prototypes. Unfortunately the article doesn't say whether any of them flew. The moon base is part of the movie being advertised. That's fiction. The German attempts to build such a machine were real.

There's one big flaw in the design. If the outer rim rotates at high speed, I don't see how they could stop the inner part rotating in the opposite direction once it left the ground. Helicopters get around this by having a small rotor on the tail to keep the body steady, but these discs don't seem to have a tail. Another way would be to have two sets of blades rotating in opposite directions. Again, there doesn't seem to be room for this in the designs.

Is it even possible to make a circular flying craft? It seems it certainly is. At least at the model scale. I don't know how well those designs would scale up. It is, however, possible.

What's special about this shape of craft is its maneuverability. Like a helicopter, it doesn't have to travel in any particular direction. It can hover or even fly backwards. It can change direction at speed without having to bank or turn. It would be faster than a helicopter at all these things because it is, in effect, just the blade part. There is no heavy passenger cabin hanging below the propulsion unit, the whole thing is the propulsion unit. One thing stops them being spaceships - they can only work in an atmosphere. Rotating propellors get you nowhere in space.

If I was involved in a secret military project to get one of these things working (I'm not and never have been) then how can such a thing be kept secret? Simple denial won't work for long. They'd have to be test-flown and sooner or later, someone will see them. Once in a while there's likely to be a crash.

If, however, a couple of pilots were to dress up as aliens now and then, land in a field where they'd be seen, and start a rumour that the ships were from another planet, then the entire project remains secret as long as everyone who takes an interest is looking the other way.

It's still possible that these UFOs are coming from another world, of course, but there is also the possibility that those 1940's plans weren't discarded when they were captured. They might be from another world. Or they might be from this one.

Perhaps even a mixture of both.

Nature laughs at us.

2010-11-15T04:03:00.004Z

This is a Venus flytrap. It's just a little plant. The leaves are able to close over insects if two of the four internal triggers are tripped and if it gets one, that leaf seals closed and acts as a stomach. The insect is digested.

I know, I shouldn't use flash facing glass but it was the only way. This little plant has been in my greenhouse all year as a natural pest control but now it's cold, it's inside.

The insect-catching part is pretty clever for a plant that lives in nutrient-poor swampland but it's not the cleverest part. It does something much cleverer.

The flower stalk appeared many weeks ago. Since I have seen 'The little shop of horrors' I thought, if that thing says hello, it'll be meeting the secateurs. It didn't. It produced a very long stalk with flowers at the top and as soon as the flowers opened, it stopped producing insect-catching leaves.

This plant, like most plants, needs insects to carry pollen from one flower to another. It also needs insects for nutrients because its natural habitat has so few. So, in a remarkably clever way, it puts its flowers well out of reach of its insect-catching leaves and also reduces its rate of production of those leaves. Now that it's nearly finished flowering it's throwing out the flycatchers again.

That's thinking ahead. By a plant.

Oh sure, we can say that it's just evolutionary response, but that means we have to reduce human 'thinking ahead' to evolutionary response too. Which will we have? Religion puts us above nature, atheism makes us part of nature but above mere animals and plants but that is not logical.

Plants have been here a hell of a lot longer than humans, by the Dawkins Directive, therefore we cannot claim to be evolutionarily superior to plants. Or even bacteria. Intelligent human life has, by geological timescale, only just popped up. So have plants, reptiles and birds stayed stupid all that time?

One thing or the other is all I'm asking. Are we part of nature or not?

I'd say we are but we are not a big part. Not as big as we imagine, not by a long way. We see ourselves as masters of the universe.

Nature sees us as monkeys with shiny toys.

We are part of nature, we are not and never have been its masters. Even if you take the religion standpoint of Adam and Eve, we are not in charge. We are merely gardeners.

We don't even have the observational skills of a pigeon...

So let's keep our arrogance in check. We are a fairly impressive species for the current epoch, but if we had been around in T. rex's day we'd have been a food crop. We make estimates of the universe based on local observations, we declare scientific rules that might or might not apply beyond the small places we have measured and we insist that we are in some way important.

Yet, if the Climatologists are to be believed, a degree or two of warming will kill us all even though here in Scotland the difference between summer and winter can far exceed 40 C. It has been wider. Scotland is not depopulated. The country is not brought to its knees by climate change (aka seasonal variation). And I can assure you, it's not warm here.

We were part of nature but we are becoming a joke. Scared of a bit of frost or of the sun that keeps us alive. Frightened of 0.5 C temperature change when nobody lives anywhere that doesn't vary by ten times that amount within 24 hours.

Nature is not out to get us. Nature is just laughing.

Nature - and this is the hard part to get - genuinely doesn't care.

Nature is busy with new stuff. We are old stuff.

Lab ghosts and copyright theft.

2010-11-06T22:13:00.006Z

The lab ghost remains camera shy and uncommunicative. I've taken to leaving video cameras running overnight, so we'll see if that catches him out. His most active areas are in parts of the building I can't access at night but now that the clocks have gone back and the winter approaches, it will soon be dark enough within normal working hours.

The new boss of that part of the building scoffs at the idea of ghosts but I noticed that on the Monday following the end of summer time, she was out of there along with the rest of the staff at 5pm, when darkness fell. Usually there are a few hanging around until after 6 pm. So maybe he's been busy spooking the new girl.

It's getting darker and colder and according to the long-standing residents, that's when the ghost gets most active. That's most likely to be because in the summer, it doesn't get dark until well after everyone has gone home and it's full daylight again before they come back in the morning. It's not so much that he's more active, it's more that there are still people there when it's dark. If he has more to play with, it's going to make him harder to catch but then I'll stay later than the rest will so if he wants someone to spook, I'll be the only one available.

Anyway, in the absence of anything to report, I did a little browsing and came across an interesting tale of Internet retribution.

This writer claims that a magazine lifted an article she wrote and republished it without telling her. When she complained, the magazine claimed that 'everything on the internet was public domain' so there was no copyright issue (they are very, very wrong) and that the writer should thank them for editing the work they stole before publishing it.

Well, the magazine has a Facebook page which is now likely to collapse under the weight of comments. In fact they seem to have two, although one might be a spoof. The magazine is unrepentant and if they keep up that attitude, I don't expect them to last very long.

Every word on the Internet is copyrighted, in the same way that every word on paper or chiselled into stone is copyrighted. Whoever tapped the keys that put those words into the machine - that's the copyright holder. It doesn't have to be registered anywhere and it doesn't need to have that little 'c in a circle' symbol attached.

Some things matter more than others. I'm not going to engage a lawyer if someone takes stuff from this blog. It's just ramblings, it costs nothing and earns nothing and I have no intention of making it into a book. The photos I occasionally post are not as good as the originals because I have to reduce their size to make them fit here. I would like to see anything copied from here credited back to me (as I would credit anything I find back to its source) but it's just not important enough to chase.

Articles and the like are not blog posts. They take much more thought and effort than the stream-of-consciousness babble that appears here. They involve work and taking someone else's work to sell for profit is theft. Even if the thief leaves the owner's name on it. It's no different to selling a stolen jacket with someone else's name tag inside - sure, their name is on it but the thief is getting the profit from that stolen property.

I don't think those running that magazine have appreciated how copyright on the Internet works. They took someone's article and published it without contacting the author at all. They then used that article in a magazine which makes them money. The author received no payment of any kind and only patronising condescension when she complained. That was a very bad idea.

In real life, if you act like a dick, only a few people are likely to see it or hear about it. As long as you stop, it's soon forgotten.

On the internet, it's global. The whole world sees, and it's immediate. Computers all over the world record and cache your idiotic behaviour and Internet users can message each other in seconds on things like Twitter or those instant message-link things like MSN that I've never managed to cope with. Within hours, it's everywhere, and it will leak into the real world through Emails and iPhones and Blackberries soon after that.

Yet the magazine in question still refuses to issue a simple apology and a small donation to an organisation - which is all the original author wants. Huge compensation lawsuits have been built on less than this. Sooner or later, an unscrupulous lawyer will find this author, note that it's an open-and-shut case backed up by the snide response of the magazine, and persuade that author that he can get her enough compensation to retire. He probably can, too, and he'll leave the entire staff of that magazine in the poorhouse when he's done.

We call such lawyers 'ambulance chasers' because they are on the lookout for easy cases where someone has been wronged and someone else is clearly and definitely to blame. Everything on the internet has a date stamp. Proving which copy was first is no problem. Compounding this, the magazine have admitted by Email that they care not a jot for copyright and that they did, indeed, lift the entire article without attempting to contact the author.

Someone once copied 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' by taking a download, printing it and selling the copies on eBay. I would never have known, had a kindly commenter not spotted it and pointed it out. I didn't sue, the book is hardly an important (or even noticeable) source of income, but I did write to eBay and the plagiarist vanished. It wasn't about the money because the book doesn't make enough in a year for half a bottle of Christmas whisky, it was the principle. It was theft.

Don't rush to buy that version. I'm working on a much longer and more detailed version. It'll take a while.

When you copy a computer file, the original file remains intact. This is the justification for 'it's not really stealing' because nothing physical has gone missing. However, the principle of theft still applies. It's still taking something without the owner's permission. Something they created through their own efforts and are entitled to profit from, should they so choose. Even if they don't intend to profit from it, that does not justify someone else taking it and profiting from it.

The magazine has admitted taking the writer's article and using it in their for-profit publication. That news is now on the Internet, and it should come as no surprise to find that the Internet is stuffed full of people who write or create art and who don't want their work stolen. Logically, then, you can expect the internet to react to the identification of such a thief in their midst in much the same way as cows with calves will react to the presence of a dog. By stamping on it until the bloodied pulp presents no further threat. They will not stop until the threat is extinguished.

It might have been a good magazine. I doubt I'll ever get the chance to read it now.

Update: Looks like this cookery magazine is toast.

Teeth grinding time.

2010-10-23T01:19:00.002+01:00

With the onset of dark evenings, the lab ghost is active again. I have been staying there very late and have been so frustrated that if the swine wasn't already dead I'd strangle him.

Tonight, another renter-of-labs (he works on solar power installations. In Scotland!) left at around 7 pm and said, on his way out, 'Watch out for the ghost'. He doesn't know why I'm there so late, so often. There are only so many 'crank' jibes you can stand to hear so it's best just to leave them in ignorance.

The ghost is well known among the occupants of the building. In winter it can be dark at 3 pm so it's not only the late-stayers who get to meet him. Long-term residents have called him 'Fred' but he doesn't interact so his real name isn't known.

The history - 'Fred' has scared many over the years but he's not doing anything scary. Lone workers late at night hear footsteps and voices. 'Fred' likes to slam doors that have been left open. He seems a bit obsessive about closing doors to unused rooms - as anyone who lived before central heating would be. Sometimes he's seen but never clearly enough for a description. He never pops out and goes 'boo', he rarely moves anything and never throws anything, he ducks out of sight if spotted and generally appears to be shy. He has shown no sign of being dangerous at all.

The lab block is built on the site of an old watermill that goes back centuries. There are no records of deaths in the lab block and so far, I can't find anything at all on the watermill. Part of the old building still exists but most is now modern. 'Fred's' range extends beyond the old watermill part so it's possible he was a farm worker in the fields surrounding the mill, or died in a house or farm building that was once here. I don't know yet.

Everyone in this place is aware of 'Fred'. Everyone. He is not restricted to psychics and mediums. He can get close to a full apparition. The swine will not speak to me and disappears as soon as he sees a camera. I know he can speak and I know he's not alone because there are conversations. Get the recorder out and they shut up.

There is no reason to be scared of 'Fred'. He has never done anything threatening. His range extends outside too, I've seen him out there, but he will not let me photograph him. He is not a 'recording' because he doesn't repeat actions, he is aware of the living, and he can interact. He just won't.

Catching him on film is going to be difficult. He's very good at avoiding cameras.

This is possibly the most challenging one yet.

Better Not-green than Dead.

2010-10-01T05:36:00.003+01:00

Americans will remember the McCarthyite 'Better Dead than Red' slogan of the past, unless your history has been eradicated or politically modified just like ours. I have taken liberties with it which is the opposite of what any politician likes. After all, if we all started looking after ourselves, those poor useless politicians would all have to find real jobs and they just aren't suited to that.

There have been interesting developments in recent days. Smokers are to be punished. Fat people are to be punished. Now, if you don't worship the Green God of the Church of Climatology, you are to be pureed.

This is not for the faint of heart. It comes from people who call other people 'violent'. Keep that in mind while you watch the casual murder of those who disagree with the Green God's acolytes.

Nasty, eh?

Inspired by this Green polemic, I think I'll burn down a forest, ignite a gas field and hard-wire all the street lamps to permanently 'on'. If I was ever asked to describe the absolute worst way to persuade people to any cause, this video would cover it.

This comes on the same day that we learn the British scientific establishment has taken the first step to admitting Global Warming was all a con trick.

Those Green Men had better press their red button quickly because the sensible people are building a green one.

I'll press it.

Updated Oct 3rd:

The video vanished within hours and the YouTube version was made private. However, the Internet is an unforgiving place and YouTube now has an evil twin where nothing is censored or hidden.

So the video is still available, and the first 'adapted' versions are already appearing - there's one here.

Making blunders on the Internet is never a good idea.

Wintergreen.

2010-09-17T02:59:00.003+01:00

The herb wintergreen contains salicylic acid, the active ingredient of aspirin. For many years we have been told that half an aspirin a day wards off heart attacks. Wintergreen is never mentioned.

Now we are told that a quarter of an aspirin a day can ward off bowel cancer. Still no mention of wintergreen.

There is no need to add to the profits of the pharmaceutical companies and risk the effects of additives in the pills.

Just plant some wintergreen.

The pub ghost?

2010-09-16T00:47:00.002+01:00

Many pubs claim ghosts, certainly in the UK. We like pubs so it's not surprising that so many choose to spend eternity in one. Many Brits spend most of their lives in one anyway. Well, until smoking was banned in pubs, and now they are dying at an alarming rate because most of their clientele were smokers - but that's a different story.

There was a video on this story but it's been removed due to a copyright claim. The story might vanish as a result because it's nothing without the video.

The video is available in the local paper's website or by clicking on the 'video' link here. I'm not sure if this will work outside the UK because it's not a national newspaper.

Much as I would love to believe this is a ghost, and even though it looks to be the right size and fits with the seating arrangements in the pub and looks very convincing, unfortunately I can't escape the feeling that it's a small fly on the lens. I see it flexing its wings and then scurrying out of shot. I am not convinced.

Pity.

Sensible investigations.

2010-08-30T00:04:00.003+01:00

Something Southern Writer pointed out to me, and which is deserving of further propagation, is the story of an amateur ghosthunter who was looking for a ghost train but was hit by a real one. The story was picked up by the UK press too, here.

Looking at the picture of that bridge, it is not a good place to be. There is no room to stand back and let a train pass by, the only options are run or jump when a train comes. So being on the bridge is not sensible.

It's also not a good place to try for a photo. Better to be at the end of the bridge, safely clear of the tracks, with the camera covering as much of the bridge as possible. Trying to take a photo, even of a real train, at the trackside at night will get no more than a blur. Trying to convince anyone that it's a photo of a ghost train will just invite derision. Stay clear of the tracks. It won't help your case if you are pureed by a few hundred tons of steel. It'll probably hurt a lot too.

So, be sensible. You're going out in the dark, sometimes the pitch dark. Check it out by day first. Is there a safe place to duck into to avoid live hazards? Are there holes you could break a leg in? Are there trip hazards? Could you describe to the emergency services exactly where you are and how to get there, should the need arise? Is your phone fully charged? If it's pay-as-you-go, as mine is, is there credit on it? Can you get reception in that area - and if not, have you told anyone where you'll be and when to expect you back? Check everythng in daylight first. Sometimes you'll even find a logical explanation for the phenomenon, such as (perhaps) a distant reflective sign, that will help explain an alleged haunting. That will save you spending the entire night in the cold and dark.

I have no problem with amateur ghosthunters, they have time to look at things I don't have time or funding to investigate. As with amateur astronomers, they will likely produce a lot of very useful information.

However, the collected information is no use if you die before telling anyone about it. So the first priority has to be - get out of the investigation intact.

Remember, we are trying to prove the existence of ghosts. We are not supposed to be in a hurry to join them.

That day will come, soon enough. When it does, there will be a host of people who won't believe we even exist.

And those we prove ourselves to will be of no use if they are a streak of red paste on a railway line.

First rule of investigation: make sure you can get out of it alive.

The Lemon Tree Rider.

2010-08-19T01:29:00.003+01:00

The language in some of the videos of this event is somewhat intemperate. I'm sure the light is genuine because there are multiple observations by different people. I'm just not sure it's a ghost.

First, an apology for vanishing for so long (to anyone who gives a damn). Life has been hectic this year and weather has been dreadful so I've had nothing at all to report. It rained every day through most of June, all of July and up until a few days ago. Not good ghosthunting weather at all.

Now, the story. This is an Australian alleged haunting, which is supposed to be the ghost of a motorcyclist killed on a road called Lemon Tree Passage. Rumour has it that the ghost follows speeding drivers to persuade them to slow down and appears, Candyman-style, if you hit 111 miles per hour.

Now, the idea that seeing a ghost behind you would cause you to slow down must sound strange to most people. I'd stop because I'm actively trying to find and record them but I know most people's reaction would be to push their car to warp speed.

The magical 111 miles per hour seems unlikely too, unless the ghost is set up along the road with a police-style speed camera. Indeed, some commentators claim the light appears when they drive at much lower speeds but always well over the speed limit. The other aspect is that the driver must have just passed their driving test within the last year.

It sounds to me more like a rite-of-passage challenge than a haunting. Even so, there is the light to consider, which has been filmed multiple times and resembles the single headlight of a motorcycle following the car.

It might really be there. It might even be a ghost. Or it might be a live motorcyclist driving along behind, with no idea that the car in front thinks he is in any way supernatural.

Another possibility is in the camera. The images are total darkness apart from occasional glimpses of bits of passing foliage and in once case, what might be a street lamp or a passing plane. In those conditions, the camera might well be set to 'night-shot' or equivalent.

Many cameras now sport one or two infrared LED's for their night-shot capability. Digital cameras see infrared and show it on screen as white or as shades of grey. It is possible that what many of those films show is a reflection of the camera's own infrared LED in the back window of the car.

Of course, that might not be the case at all. It might still be a real ghostly night rider following these speeding youths, but I have to consider all alternatives. In any case, it would be sensible to debunk this ghost whether it's real or not, to stop the lunacy of inexperienced drivers driving at 111 miles an hour in total darkness. They have some large wild animals in Australia and animals don't always check for traffic before crossing the road.

Australia is on the other side of the planet so I'm not going to pop over and see for myself. It would be interesting to see whether any local ghosthunters take up the challenge (with a professional driver) and ideally with a roof-mounted rear-facing camera to avoid reflections from the rear window.

If that could be done, and they still saw a light. and it didn't pass them when they slowed down, I'd be very interested indeed.

Ships and disaster.

2010-07-16T04:40:00.002+01:00

After the World Trade Centre was destroyed by terrorists (I don't believe that 'inside job' conspiracy), a ship was made out of the steel that was recovered. The USS New York is a battleship, which seems appropriate.

What is really spooky about this is that while the excavations are underway for new building at the site of the World Trade Centre, they uncovered the remains of... a ship. Part of a ship, anyway, from the 1700's and most probably used as landfill to extend Manhattan's land area.

So the building that became a ship was always standing on top of a ship. Funny how things tend to go in circles, isn't it?

The one worry in all this is that if they are digging foundations in a place where a very tall building stood and they've found something they haven't seen before... were the previous foundations really deep enough?

Film watching, and fun with mirrors.

2010-07-04T23:55:00.004+01:00

Chaos still rules the weather here. Thursday night was a monsoon, Friday was tropical heat, and today (Sunday) we had hail. If there were any Americans here who fancied a 4th July firework celebration, the hail was powerful enough to knock those rockets back down. Nobody has anything to investigate, none of those outdoor venues are safe to visit while the weather remains unpredictable, so I have to find other things to do.

I finally managed to see a film Southern Writer recommended a long time ago - 'Paranormal Activity'. It was a very entertaining film with pretty accurate background information. Within the 'artistic licence' range of accuracy, naturally.

Some points - if you have a haunting, ouija boards almost always make things worse. You might think it's a good idea to play with a ghost but you know, they might have games in mind that you don't want to play. Once you have invited them to play with you, you lose the choice of when the game ends. You hand over control to the spirit and that is never a good idea.

Why do you think those old magicians designed all those elaborate and time-consuming diagrams? It's because what they were calling was dangerous and had to be contained. If you were taking delivery of a wild-caught tiger, you'd be sure to have a strong cage in place first, right? Playing with an ouija board is like taking delivery of that tiger, giving it the run of the house and thinking 'It just wants to play'. It does, it wants to play cat-and-mouse. You get to be the mouse.

The paranormal investigator who opted out of the job was right to do so. This particular job was out of his skill set. If someone wanted an exorcism, I wouldn't do it. I don't have that skill and if I tried, I'd make matters worse. Rather than sedating and removing the tiger from your house, all I'd achieve would be like poking it with a stick until it was really angry. The spirit world is not a TV channel. It's not there for entertainment and if you turn it on, you can't turn it off. I think the film makes that part clear.

A very entertaining film, with pretty accurate background. Don't have any drinks in your hand for the last fifteen minutes or so.

Anyway, with nothing to do, I decided to wander with my camera on Friday. A blue-sky day, rare in these parts lately, and the heavy rain the night before had washed everything clean. In particular, it had washed a certain mirror clean.

On some roads with blind corners, there are convex mirrors so you can see whether anything is coming around the corner. These give a distorted view but all you need to know is whether anything is moving, so they do the job they're supposed to do. Unless they are dirty or coated with condensation.

This one was the cleanest I've ever seen it. I trimmed the photo down to just the mirror and its black backboard.

I've never owned a fisheye lens. These mirrors provide a decent approximation of the effect.

Pity they are fixed in place.

Electric Smoking again.

2010-06-28T03:04:00.002+01:00

I'm still Electrosmoking rather than real-smoking. The benefits - No ash. No ashtray. No lingering smoke. It's considerably cheaper and best of all, no cough. The only downside is that it's not quite the same as a really good cigar and sometimes I miss that. I suppose I could allow myself a real one once in a while. National No Smoking day, perhaps. I'll consider it next time.

However, Electrosmoke has no particulates, no tar, none of the nasty chemicals at all and in fact, no smoke either. It's steam with a little nicotine in it, and nicotine is just about as harmful as caffeine, ie - not. Not unless you take in massive amounts at once. None of the nasty stuff is present in Electrosmoke, and nothing is burning. The vapour is produced by a little heater and a 3.6 volt battery.

I don't consider myself an ex-smoker and I won't be calling myself a 'vaper' because I'm still a smoker. I'm still enraged at the ludicrous claims made by the antismokers (who still hate me anyway so I might as well keep the 'smoker' tag) and I am still absolutely opposed to the North Korean style of control these people want to exert over everyone.

So I'm a smoker who has moved with the times and now does it without all that messy ash and fire. It's better for night time photography too - the steam vanishes within seconds instead of hanging around on a still night and getting caught up in photos.

I'd recommend any smoker try one of these things. If you smoke cigarettes you can get a trial set here. Not everyone takes to them, some find them just too different from tobacco, but if it works for you then you can smoke without any risk at all. Sure, there have been attempts already to claim that they 'harm non-smokers' but if you believe that there is a risk in second hand steam, then there really is no hope for you and you'd be better to sell your brain to someone who can make proper use of it. Second-hand smoke is touted with no proof at all. Second hand steam?

(Those are UK company links. They sell overseas, I think, but you might get a local supplier if you run a quick search.)

No particulates and no chemicals apart from flavoured steam and nicotine. You can get any flavour you like. I don't just mean cigar/cigarette/pipe. You can get apple and strawberry and coffee and absinthe and even roast chicken flavours for a really surreal smoke. Many flavours are available.

You can also get all these flavours nicotine-free so all you get from the device is flavoured steam. Just as the non-drinker can join in the party with alcohol-free wine and the vegetarian can join in the barbecue with vegetarian sausages and burgers, the non-smoker can now have something that looks like smoking but is nicotine-free, tar-free, in fact smoke-free. Just flavoured steam.

Whenever I say that, I get 'Oh, but it will start people smoking'. Will it? Does the veggie burger make the vegetarian crave a rare steak? Does the alcohol-free wine make the non-drinker demand whisky? If there is no nicotine and no tobacco at all in there, what can they become addicted to?

There is a certain terror attached to smoking these days. All you need do is put a cigar on a table - even a fake cigar like mine - and people break out in a sweat. They seem as scared as if I had placed a bundle of dynamite there with a timer ticking down. It's because it's never been about the health. It is, and has always been, about social control.

The smoking ban caused the invention of Electrosmoking which is totally harmless. There is a risk in real smoking, that's undeniable, but it's only a risk to the smoker. Smokers can eradicate that risk by switching to Electrosmoking or they can reduce the risk by switching to part-Electrosmoking. It would be like cutting down without cutting down. It would be like an alcoholic replacing part of his daily intake with alcohol-free drinks. The risk can be reduced to negligible.

The antismoking groups don't like Electrosmoking because it looks like smoking and that is what they want to stop. Also, they get a lot of their funding from the makers of patches and gum that are useless. It's not health that drives them. It's control. Control over smokers, but more than that, control over a huge mob of antismoking zealots who will believe any old rubbish because it suits them.

Electrosmoking works for me. It won't work for everyone. It is a completely harmless form of smoking and it has been banned in several places already - not because of any real harm, but simply because it looks like smoking.

As long as the antismoking Nazis exist, I am a smoker and will remain so.

Just... a high-tech one.

The world behind the shed.

2010-06-22T22:11:00.003+01:00

In the absence of investigations, garden repairs continue. This year's solstice was a grey washout but today there was a big yellow thing in the sky for a while. I seem to recall seeing it before...

The most terrifying part of the garden is Behind the Shed. There is room to get in there and paint both shed and fence - but not without getting covered in paint - and that space is deadly. It's where all the junk goes, all those things that might be useful but never are. They can't be seen from anywhere in the garden so there is no barrier to their buildup over time.

Therefore, Behind the Shed has been neglected for years because to paint and repair in there means clearing out the junk first.

This year, with nothing better to do, I have removed all the junk, patched and painted the shed and fence and it all looked great until I put the junk back. Well, not the stuff that had actually rotted, but the stuff that might be useful one day.

Realistically, I won't even look behind there again for at least two years.

The clouds are breaking here and hopefully it will be safe to risk staying out overnight very soon. I have done something that will guarantee it won't rain for a while. I've installed a rainwater barrel.

Investigations soon. I hope.

The human becomes inhuman.

2010-06-20T00:36:00.003+01:00

There are fewer and fewer reports of ghosts lately. This is probably due, in large part, to the weather. A few days from Midsummer and I have plants dying of the cold, so anyone who wants to claim the world is warming had better brace themselves. I'm likely to get vociferous.

In the cold, staying out all night on the off-chance of getting a result is not an appealing prospect. Few are willing to shiver, only to find the scratching sounds they recorded were a mouse or rat, the 'voice' was just the wind and the lights were some reflective surface a mile or so away. Good results are rare and take persistence and it's hard to be persistent when you can't feel your fingers. No wonder so many take solace in those out-of-focus dust particles and mice in the walls.

There is also the matter of the economic state of the country which is such that homeless people are richer than the government. They might have nothing but at least they don't owe more money than exists. Many people are in constant fear of losing their jobs and their homes. Distracted people with heads full of worries rarely see the lamppost they are about to walk into, never mind a ghost.

Plenty of reason, then, for the general public to ignore hauntings or any attempt at communication by a spirit. This does not explain the cries of 'Photoshop!' as soon as any photo appears. No investigation, no study of the image, just shout 'Photoshop!' and the debunking is considered done. Yes, in many cases, it is Photoshop but these can be spotted. Images dating from before Photoshop are not so easily dismissed, yet the cry is the same. Even nature photos, dramatic pictures of an eagle in flight, say, are met with this cry. Why so cynical?

This might be the reason.

People don't interact with nature any more. When they ignore the normal, how can we expect them to pay any attention to the paranormal? If they don't believe a photographer who captures images of an eagle taking a bird in flight, they certainly will not believe an image of someone who's dead.

I have a mouse in my garden. I have mentioned this to people locally and they are horrified. They want me to kill it. I refuse because it's not doing me any harm. If it was in the house, chewing electrical wiring and eating holes in food packets it would be a different matter. It's not. It's in the garden, where, as far as I am concerned, it has a perfect right to be.

As do the bumble-bees who have set up home in my compost bin. I have been told I must kill them in case they sting someone. They won't sting anyone unless they are threatened. Bumble-bees are not vicious, not like wasps (who are top of the kill list, even above slugs). I have fruit trees. Bumble-bees are welcome. I can tolerate not using the compost bin for a year. Bumble-bees only live one year, then they produce queens and males who leave and mate. The males die, the queens hibernate and all of the original colony dies. So I'll get my compost bin back at the end of the year and in the meantime, my plum and apple trees are already showing the beginnings of fruit.

Against a six-foot fence stands some bamboo. This has surprised me by surviving several winters including this last one, which seems to have not quite left yet. I pulled it back to paint the fence but let go quickly. On top of the fence post, behind the bamboo, is a blackbirds' nest. They've probably finished with it already but I'll leave it there for now, just in case. It'll be the cheeky blackbird who has often faced me down (and lost) for ownership of the garden. He's almost a pet, that one. I've noticed a couple of young ones about lately, along with young sparrows by the dozen and a load of tiny bluetits who seem to fly like hummingbirds. There are regular visits from a robin, some wrens, three wood-pigeons, starlings and a host of others.

I haven't seen a heron this year but that'll be because I filled in the dead pond. Not that they ever managed to get any fish after the first time. I installed a net. I have nothing against herons but there are two rivers nearby. They can fish there.

I wonder how many could even name these birds now? How many would eat apples from a tree? How many recognise any kind of fruit if it's hanging from a branch? I know of several local public paths where blackberries and raspberries grow wild. Nobody seems to touch them. That's fine by me, I can get a few pounds of free fruit every year.

There was a time when you had to compete. You had to watch the wild fruit until it ripened, knowing others were watching too, then it was a race to get it. You also had to pick out the insect grubs before consumption even though it didn't really matter too much because they aren't poisonous. We don't have many dangerous animals in the UK as long as you know what you're picking up.

These days, hardly anyone bothers. I've seen such fruit rotted on the plant. I've seen woodland floors strewn with hazelnuts and crabapples. What I never see any more, as the author of that article says, are children turning over logs to find lizards or picking hazelnuts or setting up a makeshift camp or building a mud dam across a stream or even climbing trees. Health and Safety forbids it all. As children, we would not have listened.

Modern children would probably not listen either but their parents are brainwashed into believing that there's a paedophile on every street corner and that anything not cellophane-wrapped is deadly. Children in this country are developing rickets - rickets! - because they are not getting outside any more. They are becoming obese and every official idiot is demanding something be done but in the old days, when we ignored the official idiots, children weren't fat. Well, a few were, but genetics could account for that. Most of us were active and fairly slim.

We ate gooseberries and blackcurrants off the bush. We climbed for crabapples and nuts. We came home covered in mud with jars of lizards or tadpoles to keep as pets. My father once set up an old tin bath in the backyard, filled it with water and stones and we watched the tadpoles grow into frogs. I once came home with a toad who lived in our back garden for a while and kept the slugs under control. There's a hedgehog who patrols my garden now and performs much the same purpose. You don't have to control nature. You just have to let it control itself. It's been doing the job for a very long time and it doesn't need our help.

In the modern world, if it hasn't been sanitised by a supermarket, people won't eat it. They want it on a plastic tray or they don't believe it's food. It also has to be guaranteed to be free of any of those 'dangerous' bacteria that are easily killed by proper cooking because they are too lazy for proper cooking.

People have disconnected from the natural world. They don't even believe in the natural so how will they cope with the supernatural? There's only one way to cope - to dismiss it entirely. If they insist that a photo of an eagle catching its prey is Photoshopped, then how can they possibly accept what cannot be so readily seen?

When people lived on the land and were among nature every day, the paranormal was accepted as normal. Now people live in concrete and plastic and the paranormal is an entertainment show on late-night TV, with some pretend psychics and pretend hauntings to tittilate the masses.

Who is right? Those who were in tune with the real world, or those who aren't?

The dead ghosts.

2010-06-17T03:27:00.003+01:00

I haven't been online for a while because there hasn't been much to say. The sky is slate grey from horizon to horizon and featureless. Rain is spontaneous and unpredictable so investigation is pointless.

Instead I've been wondering about things. There are six billion people on the planet now. There are an awful lot of dead ones stretching back over the ages. Where are all the ghosts? We should see at least a dozen each by now.

Another thing I wonder is when did it start? Are there Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal ghosts? I haven't heard of any. Australopithecene hauntings are unheard of. At some point, we either changed from an animal to another type of creature or the religious are right.

Sceptics are guffawing already but last week's New Scientist insists that we are not as other animals. We are not only aware, we are aware of being aware. If we are special, then the question must be 'why?' If we are not special, then why does science regard humanity as better than dogs? If we can have a lucid dream then why cannot a cat or a pig or a duck-billed platypus? Is it because we are much more spiritual than other animals? Why? If the word 'spiritual' gets the sceptic muscles twitching, then what word would you prefer? Either we are just another mammal or we are not. Which do you want? One or the other. You can't have both and switch between them depending on the situation.

Either we contain a soul or spirit, call it what you want, that carries on existing after we die, or we don't. The evidence I have seen but cannot irrefutably prove suggests we do but then why are they not all still here? Where are they?

Most religions say that there is a heaven and/or hell where spirits go. Catholics have made up levels of hell and a new place called Limbo that isn't in any religious text, but then Catholics do tend to get carried away with this sort of thing. Those spirits who are lost remain here. I have no evidence at all for a heaven or hell but then the ghosts I've seen won't have been to either of them - because none come back. So I can't discount that.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that there are no ghosts, only demonic spirits who can pretend to be human ghosts. One I know locally, who is a self-employed painter (canvas painting, not decorator painting) will not paint any subject that includes a graveyard. It might provoke the nasties he believes hang around there. That's possible. Faced with something ethereal and human-looking, could any of us tell for certain whether it was Granny or a demon pretending to be Granny? I think the JW's are wrong on this. My grandmother called to me at the moment she died and I was hundreds of miles away. That's my feeling on the subject but I cannot absolutely rule out the possibility of an impersonating demon. I just don't see what the demon would have gained in that action.

Three more possibilities are floating around. One is that the spirit, separated from the body, has a finite lifespan. This can depend on available energy to support that spirit. It would explain why rural areas are largely ghostless. If the spirits have no energy source they will not be able to sustain any sort of manifestation and might eventually fade out of existence altogether.

The second concerns travel. Are ghosts bound to Earth? If I had the ability to visit Jupiter or Saturn, without being crushed by their atmospheres, I'd do it. Who wouldn't? If, as a spirit, we could wander the universe, why would we stay here? If ghosts are not bound by a planet then they could be off wandering and sightseeing.

Finally, what if there is a spirit predator? Every natural system we know about has predators. Could there be some kind of unknown creature that lives on ghost energy? Are those ghosts being eaten? It would explain why there are so few very old ghosts around. Roman ghosts, for example, tend to be of the 'recording' variety rather than the actual spirit.

All speculation, but being effectively house-bound can do that. There's a local ruined church I've been itching to look at but with no roof and random rain, it's out of the question for now.

Any more possibilities? Somewhere there are a lot of missing ghosts.

More dubious science.

2010-05-30T16:44:00.002+01:00

It looks as if science has just given up these days. Instead of reason and logic, many now seem to be depending on 'This is how it is because we say so, just shut up and do as you are told'.

Those 'units per week' limits on alcohol consumption weren't the result of any research at all. They were made-up numbers. That 'five-a-day' rule for fruit and vegetables was made-up too. No research behind it at all. Second hand smoke has not a shred of evidence behind it. Third hand smoke is risible. Global warming is not actually happening - the whole thing is based on a short period of warming that ended a decade ago, and since then the planet has been cooling. It has been much hotter in the past according to those ice-core samples and life wasn't erased.

Even in the 'debunkers' camp, those who spend a lot of time trying to disprove every aspect of the paranormal, they're just not trying any more.

A group calling themselves scientists claim to have proved that those out-of-body experiences reported by people close to death are just sparks in a dying brain. Yet when you look at the report, they have proved no such thing.

What they did was to run brain scans on dying patients. A perfectly logical and sensible way to look for an explanation of near-death experiences. What they saw was a burst of furious brain activity in the unconscious patient, followed shortly by death.

None of the patients came back after that burst of activity so there are no reported visions or experiences to link to it. Furthermore, they describe the activity like so:

'We think the near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy released as the brain runs out of oxygen,' Dr Chawla told The Times.

'As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations.'

That does not sound like brain activity leading to coherent and remembered images. It sounds like the sort of random cascade that happens in cases of epilepsy.

They found a random cascade of last-burst activity in a dying brain. A final firing of neurons that have done their job and are shutting down forever. Not a series of logical and coherent pathways firing, just a last blast of random noise. None of the patients survived so there were no reported visions to link with this random noise.

From that, they conclude that they have explained the phenomenon known as near-death experience.

This is not science. This is starting with a conclusion and forcing a tenuous link from the data to pretend you've proved that conclusion. There is an awful lot of this about these days and it's time the higher echelons of science took these ludicrous experiments to task. Science seems to me to be in a seriously bad way nowadays. It's losing credibility at an alarming rate - and I say that as a scientist working on the paranormal, a field of study these same scientists deride as 'woo'.

It's not much fun battling sceptics and debunkers if they're not even going to try for the slightest shred of credibility. When nobody challenges the science, when those who do challenge it are simply labelled with whatever label they now apply to heretics and then ignored, then science is not science. Paranormal investigators are challenged on every detail and that is how it should be. It makes us take more precautions to rule out errors, and it makes us cautious in interpreting results. All branches of science must be subject to that scrutiny or there'll be more and more rubbish spouted by people who should know better.

If this slide into pretend science continues, the paranormal could well end up as the only credible branch left.

I don't think I'd like being mainstream.

An odd sort of thing.

2010-05-25T01:16:00.002+01:00

It probably means nothing but the current weather (warm with occasional and unpredictable monsoons) leaves me with time to brood on little things.

In the UK, if you use a mobile (cell) phone to send a text message, but send it to a landline phone, there's no screen on the landline phone so the message can't be displayed. Instead, you get an automated call and a recorded voice reads out the number of the phone that sent the message, then reads the message.

I had one such call today. I have no idea who owns the phone it came from, the number is nowhere in my list of contacts. The message was short and enigmatic.

"Jim passed away this morning."

Now, I know several people called Jim, scattered around the country. There are even some overseas. One in particular is an uncle who is old and hasn't been well for some time. So what do I do? Phone back the number and say 'Who are you, and which Jim do you mean?' I have a reputation for being allegedly insensitive but that's a bit much even for me.

The alternative would be to phone every Jim I know with the following short exchange:

Jim: Hello?

Me: Oh, you're not dead then.

Click.

The one who doesn't answer gets a card. I could call it 'Funeral Roulette' but that would get me further accusations of insensitivity, I suspect.

Then again, it could have been a wrong number. Probably safest to do nothing and wait until someone doesn't turn up somewhere.

Is it or isn't it?

2010-05-20T23:14:00.003+01:00

This the the 'Wem Ghost', photographed in 1995 by Tony O'Rahilly while photographing the town hall as it burned in a fire. Apparently it was a real-film rather than a digital photo and while it could be faked using real film, it's very hard to do that without it being spotted. Digital fakery is easy, but apparently this image wasn't digital.

Now, someone claims to have debunked this photo. Brian Lear claims the girl's image appears in a 1922 postcard - the girl at the left of the picture.

Unfortunately these are the only images I have, the ones from the newspaper article I've linked to. I can't enlarge the postcard to see if it's the same girl so I'll take it on trust that the two girls look very similar. They certainly seem to be wearing the same clothes.

I'm not convinced that this is a debunking. I'm not convinced by the original photo either because I'm not aware of any checks made on the negatives. Even so, all I really see here is that the Wem Ghost was dressed in 1920's style and looks like - indeed might have been - the same girl from the Wem postcard printed some 75 years earlier.

There was speculation that the Wem ghost was Jane Churm, who accidentally set fire to an older town hall in the town in 1677. The correlation in dress between the 1920's postcard and the ghost photo suggests it wasn't - but it still does not prove that the ghost photo was faked.

It is possible that the ghost photo contains the image of that girl from the 1920's postcard. She was resident in the same town and we have no record of when she died. It might have been the day after the postcard photo was taken and she might have been haunting the town since then. So the Wem Ghost might indeed be that girl from the postcard.

Or it could have been faked by transposing the postcard image onto the burning town hall. I don't think her stance is the same in the ghost photo as in the postcard but I'd need better images of both to be sure. I also don't think a 1920's postcard photo would reproduce well enough to produce the ghost image. There should be visible grain in the image, and it would be different between the image of the girl (taken with 1920's film) and the image of the fire (taken with 1995 film).

Any competent photo technician could spot that. Hell, with images from 1920 film and 1995 film, anyone with a hand lens should be able to see it.

I'll look out for better quality images on the Internet. The Wem ghost photo won't be hard to find, but the postcard might be.

I'm not saying the ghost photo is real, but I don't believe this debunking is credible. The ghost photo, for me, stays in the 'not disproven' category.

UPDATE - The Shropshire Star is where this story originated. They have an enlarged image of the girl in the postcard and she does look very, very similar to the one in the ghost photo. Even down to the shadow across her face.

The case for 'fake' is very strong indeed for this one.

Something happened while I was asleep.

2010-05-17T23:36:00.004+01:00

I feel as if I'm coming out of hibernation. For months, it has been freezing here. Far longer and far colder than usual. Only now is it warming up out there. Then we had the Government election that nobody won, and the lunacy that followed (and still follows) it. The paranormal seems to have been brushed aside - nobody has time any more.

Then again, nobody has much time for anything any more. Or anyone. People seem so tense, so rushed, so angry all the time. It does indeed sound like what Tom Sheepandgoats would call the 'end times'. Everyone is angry all the time and nobody seems to know what they are angry about.

There has been a proliferation of amateur psychological tricksters. Have you noticed, in a supermarket queue, the person behind taking small steps forward? It's an intimidation technique designed to make you hurry up. It works if you don't know about it. If you do know about it and are annoyed by it, the response is called 'precision packing' where every item must be tested in various orientations before placing it in the bag, and on no account must you be anywhere near ready to pay when the last item has come through.

By the time you put your credit card in the reader slot, they will be at your shoulder. That's when I turn around, look them in the eye and say, loudly;

"Would it be easier if I just told you the number, so you won't have to watch me type it in?"

You want to play psychological games? I like such games. Once they have withdrawn, red-faced, and I have paid and left, they still have to go through that same checkout, with the same checkout operator, the same customer waiting behind them, the same staff and customers on adjacent tills...

A small woman once decided I was in her way in the shop so she accelerated her trolley at me and looked sideways. I was supposed to panic and move aside. I stared straight at her. She lost. Cars, when overtaking, like to swerve in to assert their dominance. I have a rusty wreck so a few more dents won't trouble me so I swerve right back at them. It accelerates surprisingly fast too. I have followed people who tailgate, overtake with an inch clearance and then cut-in too tight for tens of miles. I have seen them slow to let me pass and speed up to lose me and I have stayed there, grinning in their mirrors, with no intention of doing anything more than scaring the living daylights out of them.

Psychological games are the only ones worth playing. Play them with me if you want, I like those games.

There's something deeper going on. People didn't used to cross the road without bothering to look. People didn't used to barge each other out of the way. People didn't used to try every trick to intimidate everyone they met. Cars didn't used to race at you if you were turning a junction well ahead of them. I'm not talking about twenty years ago. The difference is noticeable between this year and last. The world (at least, the UK) has become childish and pathetic. Everyone is out for themselves and cares not a fig for those around them. Okay, it means I get more justification for using voice-tone tricks and the Glare but really, those are for particularly objectionable people and troublesome students. Now, it seems everyone is asking for it.

What happened out there while I was homebound by ice? Did you all go mad or something?

Chilling.

2010-05-12T02:32:00.004+01:00

The temperature has dropped below freezing and it's snow and hail here. There might be a reason for that.

The UK has just elected a new government, with a massive public voting declaration of 'don't care'. Nobody won it. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes horsetrading in the last few days and now we will have a weak Conservative government propped up by Liberal Democrats until the whole lot collapses and we'll have to vote again. It shouldn't take long.

In this election, for the first time, a Green MP won a seat. Since then, the weather has returned to winter.

Last October our government met to discuss global warming and how much tax they could squeeze out of us for it. It snowed. The first time we'd seen snow in October for a very long time.

Then there was the Copenhagen meeting where lots of governments discussed global warming and how much tax they could squeeze out of us for it. We had the coldest and longest winter in memory and Washington looked like a scene from a natural-disaster movie. Around here, gardens that had been established for decades have been ruined by one single winter.

The tax issue mystifies me. How does taking more money from us solve anything? Are they going to bribe the planet to stay cool?

Every time the people of this planet get worked up about global warming, the temperature drops. I wonder if it's connected to Jung's 'collective unconscious' with perhaps some form of telekinesis thrown in. When so many people are trying to wish-away global warming, are they producing a cooling effect?

If so, it's a bad thing because the planet isn't warming.

Not when it's sub-zero in May.

Heavy Soul.

2010-05-02T02:20:00.003+01:00

In 1907, Duncan MacDougall published a paper on the weight of the soul. Fortean Times carried an article on it in the latest issue and so does the Journal of Scientific Exploration this month.

In essence, he took volunteers who were doomed and laid them on a bed which was suspended on a scale. When they died, their body weight immediately declined by between 10 and 45 grams. The same test applied to dogs showed no weight loss on death. Then again, it was 1907 and a smaller animal's soul might not be detectable by the methods available then. It has not been repeated because Science doesn't like it.

Involuntary evacuation of bowel or bladder at death is of no relevance because that weight is still on the bed.

It looks as though the soul might have mass. Not very much, but it does suggest a cohesive existence in the physical world. If we have up to 40 grams of reality to deal with after death, then the lack of frequent manifestation is easy to explain. We end up as substantial as fog, and must draw on external energy to appear.

Scientifically, it all fits together but Science will never recognise that.

Random thoughts. Can you hear them?

2010-04-27T01:11:00.004+01:00

I'm still spending a lot of time fighting the garden (most of which has now been deleted). I'd like to plant fresh things but I'm not yet confident the frosts have passed. The snow has at least gone but it's still pretty cold.

This isn't 'climate change'. I remember a fishing trip in April in the 1980's where the line froze to the rod rings. I also remember a May 1st, about ten or twelve years ago, where I had to seek shelter in a hurry because of hailstones that came down like buckshot. They actually punched holes in many plants.

The last ten years or so have seen warm April weather but it's just a natural cycle and nothing to get all worked up about. Unless, of course, you've set up a career or a tax income based entirely on lunatic scare stories. As, indeed, many have these days, and not just on climate change. Scares range from third hand smoke (comical) to deleting salt from the diet (dangerous) and they are everywhere now.

Funnily enough, nobody seems to be doing much about pollution, which is a real problem. They're all too involved in what kind of light bulbs we use and never seem to mention that the low-energy ones are full of mercury vapour. Whatever you do, don't break one of those things. They are far, far worse than the old filament types.

The logic has gone from science and the world, I think. This week I read an article in 'Fortean Times' about telepathy. It's not a subject I study but it's interesting because there are tantalising hints that there might be something in it. No proof, just hints.

My only possible experience was when my grandmother died. I knew she had gone even though I was hundreds of miles away at the time and when I was informed of her time of death, the time matched my experience exactly. However, that is not evidence of telepathy, but of an entirely different phenomenon which I've experienced more and more since then. Personally, I have not experienced anything I could definitely call telepathy.

The problem I have with studies on things like telepathy is not that they are too likely to find an effect, but that they are too likely to find no effect.

The current method for testing telepathy is, basically, this:

The receiver wears headphones transmitting white noise, half a ping-pong ball taped over each eye and is in a dimly-lit room with no contact possible with the outside. Okay. They can't hear or see anything.

The sender chooses one of four pictures and attempts to send it to the receiver. Then the receiver comes out of their sensory deprivation room and, with the sender cleared away so they can't give any hints, points out the picture they 'saw'.

On pure chance they would choose the right picture 25% of the time. Statistically that is correct. However, it assumes something. Something very important.

It assumes everyone is a telepath.

It assumes everyone can 'send' and everyone can 'receive'. Well, I don't seem to be able to do either of those things. Some might be able to receive but not send and vice versa.

The 25% result due to chance must be modified by the proportion of people in the population who are actually able to use telepathy. What proportion of the population can do that? I have no idea and neither does anyone else. Every test assumes it is a standard human trait.

Which is rather like assuming every human can run a mile in four minutes, or pull a railway carriage, or land an arrow in the bullseye every time. A few people can but most people can't.

I suspect telepathy is like that. I am certain that mediumship is like that. Using randomly selected people means that the few who might be genuine are lost among the noise of those who have no ability at all. So when a telepathy study turns up a 38% success rate, that is not 'just above chance'. That is astoundingly above chance.

What to do about it? I leave that to those who actually study telepathy but I would suggest devising some sort of 'pre-test' procedure which can select for those who show promise as 'senders' and those who would be best placed as 'receivers'.

The sceptics will say that this is introducing bias, but how so? If telepathy is not real then no amount of pre-selection will result in improved results. The results would be the same every time if there is no effect, no matter what criteria you use to select the participants.

If there is a real effect and if it is not in every person, then pre-selection will show an improved set of results over random selection. It will weed out those with little or no ability in the same way that successive races weed out the slow runners until only the fastest are left. If there is no real effect (as in, if everyone always ran at the same speed anyway or if nobody can transmit thought) there will be no difference.

So, take the participants who scored accurately and test them again as a subset. If telepathy is not real then the success rate will be about the same. If it is real then the selected group will score much higher than the random group. Treat it like a competition.

Worth considering, perhaps?

Snow!

2010-04-21T04:11:00.003+01:00

My new decking is covered in snow. All preparation for the greenhouse has stopped.

Mood: murderous.

Corporeal visitor.

2010-04-16T03:44:00.003+01:00

This little fellow lives in my garden. He's less than an inch long (excluding tail which is twice as long as he is) and he's photographed in the act of raiding the bird-feeders.

He wasn't bothered by my presence and I like him, so he can stay.

I'll put in a lower-down feeder for him.

Ghosts and aliens and filled-in ponds.

2010-04-14T23:08:00.003+01:00

I have been scarce lately because of the effort involved in entirely remodelling the garden. The pond is filled in, the wrecked lower lawn dug out, the dead plants bagged and ready to take to the dump. I'm putting in decking - or rather, someone who knows what they are doing is putting in decking and I'm getting in their way. For a wooden structure, there seems to be rather a lot of concrete involved.

There is some haste in this because the weather forecast says we are to expect snow next week. That's nothing unusual, I recall having to seek rapid shelter because of a hail shower that punched my hostas full of holes one year and felt like it was doing the same to me. It was the first of May, I think it was 2001 or maybe 2002. So it is not 'climate change' but it will soon be illegal to say that.

Garden centres and supermarkets have been selling garden plants for over a month, but only an idiot would buy them now. Unless he had a greenhouse, which I will order as soon as the weather calms down. I decided on polycarbonate rather than glass because it's less likely to break in a hard frost, or when rampaging mobs of drooling children-shaped demonic entities decide that throwing stones at random strangers' property is some kind of a good idea.

I might also build a pillory, in case I need it for something.

It has been an excessively long break from investigating but it's not just me who is affected. There are few reports in the news these days, nobody is willing to freeze to death on the off-chance of a photo that no sceptic will believe anyway. What is interesting is that my 'guest' appears to be active again. It's been silent throughout the cold weather and I thought it had left.

There are far more reports of ghostly activity when the temperature is comfortable than when it is cold. I'd always put this down to the investigators, rather than the ghosts, and assumed that cold weather might not affect activity anywhere near as much as it would affect those looking for it. Then again, ghostly activity is associated with a drop in temperature so maybe ghosts (human or otherwise) don't just absorb heat, but require it. The ability to generate a temperature differential might be important. That would be harder to do in severe cold and might also be hard in severe heat. This will take some thinking about.

On the UFO side of things, an American professor says that the subject should be studied properly, in universities. I agree absolutely. Sceptics will howl 'Waste of time' because they are true believers in what they think science should be about.

Science is, or should be, about investigating. Many people have reported seeing something unusual. Dismissing them all as cranks is not science. Maybe what they see is not from another world, maybe it's a phenomenon of this world and if that's the case, should we ignore a natural event on the say-so of true believers in the logic of 'I haven't seen it so it's not real'?

Maybe, just maybe, some of those sightings are totally inexplicable by science as we currently understand it.

The sceptics will say 'Then we should ignore it. It's inconvenient. Stick your fingers in your ears and sing "La-la-la". It's not real. Stay with the herd.'

I say, that's when science gets really interesting.

The death of education.

2010-04-06T02:22:00.003+01:00

Another birthday passed. Still, it's better than the alternative. Perhaps it's time to give some consideration to what I plan to do with my life. Then again, I think that way every year... for about a day.

I have to admit, my life is considerably better than the one facing this country's youth. They now leave school fully versed in Socialist dogma and the tenets of Climatology but barely able to read or add up. When I went to school, it was clear that we were there to learn. Political indoctrination was around, depending who was in power at the time but it was never so blatant and never so intense. Teachers were allowed to enforce discipline but now, any teacher who tries that is likely to end up in court on child abuse charges. Over half the schools in this country have a 'no contact' policy which means that teachers cannot lay a finger on the horrible little monsters in their charge, on pain of instant dismissal and arrest. The outcome was predictable from the start.

Even New Scientist, a magazine I thought was about science, push the Green God's agenda with religious fervour while decrying religion as mumbo-jumbo. They have reacted to calls that the actual scientific debate around global warming be taught in schools (rather than This Is So, just shut up and believe) by saying they are the same as teaching creationism.

So if you don't believe in the global warming religion, you are a heretic and must be burned. I have a very good book on the Spanish Inquisition they might like to read.

For me, creationism in schools is no problem as long as it's in religion class, not science class. It is religion, after all. I don't demand that all religions give equal sermon-time to 'alternative interpretations' so I regard it as unfair that religion demands time in science class. So yes, teach creation, but in the right classroom. Give the children all the information and let them decide for themselves which to go with.

I know, Archbishop Dawkins of the Church of Nothing would be incensed at that attitude. To him, people must be forced to not-believe for their own good. Just as Tomas de Torquemada forced people to believe in Catholicism for their own good. Exactly the same, but he'll never see it.

Let's face it. It really doesn't matter most of the time. Whether a plumber or a barrister or a policeman or even a medic believes in creation or spontaneous generation of the universe is of no relevance at all to their jobs. If you are a creationist, you're not likely to want a job studying evolution. If you take the scientific path, you are not likely to study for holy orders. It really does not matter in the slightest.

You can even be devoutly religious and not follow the '6000 years' thing. That was calculated by a man, not a god, and men are fallible.

So I would say, give all those children all the information from all sides and let them work out which they will follow. Just... in the right classes.

Now we have a government who demand that children shop their parents for smoking, believe without question in the Climatology doctrine, nag their families with utterly inaccurate and frankly dangerous assertions on salt and fat and meat consumption, and learn about all forms of sex from the age of five.

Writing and maths are not important any more. New Scientist and Archbishop Dawkins are fretting over creationism and demanding everyone follow science, but have failed to notice that nobody is teaching science any more.

When I was at school, the acceleration due to gravity was 9.8 m/s/s (how fast something accelerates when you drop it, no matter what it weighs). Now, children in school are being told it's 10 m/s/s because it makes the sums easier. So if you have gained weight, have no fear. You have not gained mass. Gravity has increased, which just makes you seem heavier.

This is far more serious than whether the children learn about God. They are being told factually incorrect information in science class, facts that apply to the here and now - and New Scientist is worried that they might learn something wrong about the past?

Where is the credibility of that science class when they change definite physical laws to make the sums easier? There is no child in the class without a calculator. I didn't have one when I learned to work out square roots and quadratic equations on paper. Calculators were not allowed in exams then. Make the sums easier? Calculators already do that. This is not about making life easier. It is pure dumbing-down of an entire generation.

A supermarket chain has complained that candidates for jobs are increasingly useless. A supermarket chain. What must the universities be thinking - oh, I forgot, they think only about money these days. Once places of study and exploration of science, they are now businesses where income trumps truth. The stuff coming out labelled 'research' nowadays might as well have been written by the funding company's marketing department and in some cases, probably was. There is little science left in universities, and less in New Scientist.

So we return to the days of Copernicus and Galileo, where individuals free of State interference perform real experiments with no outside influence forcing their conclusions.

Lucky for me, I'm already there.

Twiddling thumbs.

2010-04-01T22:19:00.003+01:00

31st March 2010. Yesterday, and this is what it looks like here. Not too deep, but it's back. It's melting again but slowly and I'm wishing I had put a bet on for a white Easter. It could still happen.

I defy anyone to report a 'cold spot' anywhere within five hundred miles. Nobody could possibly tell if the temperature dropped. It's already low enough to numb exposed skin. I also defy anyone to try to convince me that the world is warming. I can't remember the last time we had a white Easter here. My clematis should be rocketing with new growth by now - it's barely formed buds. Daffodils are only now rising above the soil. I still have snowdrops!

As for investigating hauntings - not a chance. A night out in this weather and I'd be the haunting.

I think I'll put a greenhouse where that pond was. With a heater in it.

I've just realised something. I often label photos with an abbreviated date, day/month/year, two digits each. 31st March 2010 comes out as 310310. Anyone know anything about numerology? It's interesting, but far too mathematical for me.

The Writers see sense.

2010-03-29T01:34:00.003+01:00

It's a funny thing, but most of the sensible people in the world seem to be writers. Maybe it's because writers tend to think about things rather than accept them. Maybe it's just that most people are too busy to read up on the details of things they are told and just accept them. Writers look up details for a living.

Many scientists are sensible, but then science also involves a lot of reading, writing and researching. Far too many scientists are too busy to look outside their own fields, and end up accepting far too much dogma without really thinking about it. And of course, scientists are human, and any group of humans will include some crooks.

Today I read that smoking can cause bacterial meningitis and asthma. These are not mistakes. These are out and out lies. Bacterial meningitis is caused by bacteria. Smoke has been burned and is therefore sterile. You cannot catch any form of infection from it. It is not possible for any real scientist to make that mistake. It is a deliberate lie.

The main causes of asthma (which is increasing, while smoking is in decline) are the day-to-day changes in modern life. We now have fitted carpets rather than wood or flagstone floors. Dust mites love carpets. We also seal our homes against the weather - especially true this last winter. Few of my windows have opened at all over the last months and it's all set to come back again this week. That's if the weathermen are right. I notice they aren't pushing their 'global warming' line quite so hard at the moment.

We used to complain about draughty old houses and we'd huddle around the coal fire in winter but there was a benefit. The draughts, combined with the constant flow of air up the chimney, meant that the whole of the air in the house was changed for fresh air every few hours.

Now we have double glazing and insulation and draughtproofing and radiators. No chimney. In many houses, it would take well over a week to get a complete change of air. Dust mites, trapped dust, vaccuum cleaners blasting fine particles into air that doesn't leave the house for many days, all a recipe for respiratory disease. Smokers are healthier than non-smokers these days. They spend much more time outside.

These things are among the reasons for the rise in asthma and a lot of other diseases. It's all being blamed on smoking simply to push a Puritan world on us all. I'm still Electrosmoking rather than real smoking, but they want to ban that too. The reason? It looks like smoking.

Seriously. That is the reason.

On global warming, smoking, drinking, butter vs. plastic butter-like substance, salt, fat, driving, all sorts of things, those who want controls and bans are the shrill, hysterical ones while those who consider the matters with reasoned arguments are, in one form or another, almost always writers. Most of those who come here are writers and it's about time I started linking to them.

Perhaps writers should be put in charge. They would certainly show much more imagination than the drooling oafs who currently rule us.

I came across another writer today. So, I'll start a 'writers' bloglist in the sidebar.

Well, I can't do much as far as investigation goes. The snow is coming back. So I'll fiddle with the blog and try not to break it.

Email messed up.

2010-03-19T22:47:00.002Z

The Email account linked to this blog has a 10 Mb capacity which is fine most of the time - as long as I remember to clean it out periodically.

I haven't been active online very much over this winter, so the Email filled to capacity without me noticing. I only realised something was wrong when I logged in and saw a comment which Blogger hadn't notified me about.

So if you've sent me an Email and it bounced, or left a comment and you think I'm ignoring you, it's all down to a full mailbox and me being far too lax about clearing it.

Sorry about that.