Sometimes I wonder if there is or should be a standard of how to classify depths of mistakes. I was somewhat shocked to read that the Met was found guilty in shooting goof. A goof? If Charles de Menezes had survived a minor wound, perhaps it would have been a GOOF. This was on the scale of major FUCK-UP. OK? You don’t fucking shoot someone without FIRM EVIDENCE that he is who you think he is. Suspicious actions a terrorist does not make. I know there was a great deal of pressure to crack down on potential terrorist threats. But shoot-to-kill MUST have a firmer basis before being ordered. A shooting of an innocent is not a goof. Not in my style book.
COWard
Honestly, you lot on the interwebs can’t be left alone! I spend some time away from the keyboard and this sort of shit happens. Now, where have I heard that name Nadine Dorris before? Honestly. Is that woman for real? She’s definitely NO sister.
And what’s her bag with Ben Goldacre? I read both his posts on the science committee’s recommendations on amendements to the Abortion Act and the subsequent brooha about “leaked” memos and failed to detect anything out of the ordinary. What a palavar! Only an self-important idiot would think that the select committee’s discussions were “closed meetings”. Add that to the initial charge of her ridiculous stance on abortion, and she’s in my mind: a lying COWard.
Don’t abort the Abortion Act
Finally, a level-headed statement on the abortion act. I sometimes despair of how abortion seems to be a battle-ground sans scientific evidence to back up wide-reaching statements. Admittedly, those who oppose late-stage abortions do so under moral arguments, but there is no reason why a moral argument should not be based on evidence.
A dork replies
I like Stephen Fry. I don’t know him personally, but I enjoy his writing, his blethering, his somewhat awkward sense of style. Not being a stalker-fan, I wasn’t aware that he was a gadget-freak until his recent outing. Like I said, not a stalker-fan.
That said, I take great umbrage at one sentiment in his latest post about his adoration of all things dorky:
So, believe me, a love of gizmos doesn’t make me averse to paper, leather and wood, old-fashioned Christmases, Preston Sturges films and country walks. Nor does it automatically mean I read Terry Pratchett, breathe only through my mouth and bring my head slightly too close to the bowl when I eat soup.
I was in complete agreement with him apart from that. What exactly is wrong with pTerry’s books? And is his loose sentence construction describing Terry Pratchett readers as being mouth-breathers and head-lowerers? I was appalled. Then chastened. It’s true. Every word.
Incidentally, probably apart from the lack of Discworld book ownership, Stephen Fry has described the majority of computer users. I’m not talking about those who just use Microsoft Office for work, but those of us who use them to organise our photos, music, movies, lives, work, and perhaps even interact with others socially1. Most of us who couldn’t care less which OS you run on what machine built by whom2. And yes, not everyone’s on World of Warcraft (although I would if I had the time).
1 Or anti-socially in the case of trolls.
2 Unless you’re a jealous and spiteful git. What’s with Windows users mocking me on my Mac over here anyway? I was a very early cross-OS user with a MacintoshII in my early childhood (oh SAM…), an IBM running MS-DOS followed by Windows 3.1 in my early teens was the home PC, and I built myself a series of cheap desktops since then running the whole range of Windows OS until XP, when I moved over to experiment with some of the free Linux OS. A power-board death of my last Fedora-running laptop left me stranded in LA without a home computer, hence the purchase of a Powerbook, which incidentally, is very cheap on this side of the pond. I’ve loved and hated aspects of ALL the systems I’ve made and bought in my short lifetime. I just like my Powerbook right now. It does the job quite nicely. Rant? Me? No… I just get constantly ridiculed about my Mac. It seems almost personal. Finally, a “PC” way to stigmatise somebody. They can’t make fun of my Scottish accent on a Chinese face, but they can mock my choice of OS. And my dog. They mock my ownership of a dog too.
3 Fark. That was a rant, wasn’t it? Sorry….
Are we taking the terror thing too far?
One of the most level-headed things I’ve read about the shooting of Charles de Menezes by the Met:
However, [Clare Montgomery, QC] told the jury: “If the Metropolitan Police are exposing the people of London to danger because they are not doing what is reasonable and what is practicable, it is surely in the interests of Londoners that you say so.”
The case for the defence sounds a bit more like a John le Carré novel.
Judge’s "error" about "errors"
UK scientists defend Gore film following a judge’s finding of Gore climate film’s ‘nine errors’. The background as quoted:
Mr Justice Burton was asked to rule on whether An Inconvenient Truth could be shown in UK schools. He agreed that it could, provided the “one sided” film was accompanied by guidance notes for teachers.
The case was brought by school governor Stewart Dimmock, from Dover, a father of two, and who is a member of the New Party.
Mr Dimmock did not want the movie distributed to schools. He called the Oscar-winner a “shock-umentary” and objected to children being “indoctrinated with this political spin”.
I remember vividly reading a National Geographic magazine about greenhouse gases and how increases in said gases have caused global warming1. This was back when I was a very impressionable child, and it spurred me, along with my peers, to action. From then on, we damn well switched lights, computers and TVs off whenever we weren’t abusing our gawd-given right to electricity. It didn’t make me a tree-hugging eco-warrior, but it made me very aware of humans’ actions on their environment. Photos of polar bears will usually do that.
Nonetheless, it started a lifetime of being careful and making the greenest-possible choices with my limited willpower and means. Damn right I was an impressionable child. Who knows how my life would have been different if National Geographic had been more responsible and published guidance notes to temper the one-sidedness of the greenhouse gases->global warming message. I ought to sue! They denied me decades of swanning about in low-MPG SUVs like the Glorious Humvee, sleeping by the glow of my 200-inch TV and banks of computer monitors, commuting by plane every week from Asia to Europe. And it would have saved me countless hours of sorting my glass from plastic from paper from metal waste. Hours I could have spent swanning about in my Glorious Humvee.
Publicity-hungry toe rags like Stewart Dimmock can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.
1 Incidentally, this is now known to be an overly simplistic view, but the take-home message is still the same.
Holliday junction resolution resolved to solve cancer problem
Sometimes I wonder where the breakdown in communication between scientists and journalists lies. In this article about a recent study on a DNA damage checkpoint enzyme, the Beeb describes the study as such:
Research into how the human body repairs damaged DNA has been described as a “major breakthrough”.
The way that cells protect themselves from diseases like cancer has been the focus of a study by scientists at Dundee and Leeds Universities.
The enzyme studied1 indeed has a crucial role in DNA damage repair, a mechanism that prevents the DNA in cells from getting more and more mangled with every replication cycle. But to conflate a study on structural analysis of a bacteriophage2 enzyme with cancer in humans annoys me a little. It’s sexing up the topic beyond its current reach3.
Some of the responsibility for conflation of basic science with translational/clinical applications lies with scientists. We have to justify what we do: to the funding agencies, to our peers, to the editors of journals, and to the public that ultimately funds our research by taxation. So everything we do has to somehow, however tenuously, be tied in to some disease or some way to make human life better4. So every time we publish our findings, we make that link, however thin, to some major health concern: cancer, heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, cancer, auto-immune diseases, cancer, blah blah blah. And the journalists, with their need to write an interesting article, take a lot of our fatuous crap on faith. Don’t ask for solutions. I have none. I am guilty of the same damn crime.
1 Sorry, it’s not open access. You’re unlikely to be able to read the full thing outside of a first world university/college. It’s a bugger isn’t it? Incidentally, does anyone else get annoyed that they don’t link to the studies in PubMed or even list the first author? Then again, if they had, I wouldn’t have seen via PubMed that one of the authors, David Lilley, has published in both Nature AND Science in the space of a week. That’s rare.
2 Bacteriophages are a type of virus that “infect” bacteria. Yep. Even bacteria get viral infections. Isn’t nature amazing?
3 Don’t get me wrong. I think this structural analysis of the protein is a great step forward in understanding how DNA damage repair works. The next step may happen yet. I just don’t think the next immediate step is preventing cancer.
4 Caveat: I refer here to research funded by the Medical Research Council in the UK or the various National Institutes of Health etc in the US. My world is very narrow.
Itch your skull away
All the elements of a good article: a horror story, some recent headway into the problem and written in plain English, albeit with the occasional technobabble.
Plain english synopsis here.
Why do research?
What the great one says, with research substituted for writing.
You don’t live there always when you write. Mostly it’s a long hard walk. Sometimes it’s a trudge through fog and you’re scared you’ve lost your way and can’t remember why you set out in the first place.
But sometimes you fly, and that pays for everything. –Neil Gaiman, genius.
True of any creative field, I suspect. Science to outsiders may not seem as creative as, say, painting or writing. But it is an artform in a way. And every day, we have to find creative solutions to problems1. It’s a hard, hard slog; sometimes with no end in sight (like right now!). But the occasional insight into the functioning of the universe makes it all worthwhile.
1 Whether hypothetical or simply practical in terms of lab practice
Merciless treatment of Ming
Menzies’ leaving is not much of a surprise. The timing was probably not to his own plans though. But hey, if a general election is a year away, the Lib Dems probably want to get their leadership battle out of the way and all the nasty words forgotten by the time voters cast their ballot.
akatsuki ra-ra-ra 