Oxford on the Neva

Well here's a thing I didn't know about Prince Felix Yusupov, the guy who killed Rasputin:

From 1909 to 1913, he studied Forestry and later English at University College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, and established the Oxford Russian Club.

As the Reverend Richard Coles (to whom I'm indebted for this unexpected biographical titbit) tweeted recently:

It is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rasputin [tweeted on the 21st of January]. He became so influential over the Russian royal family that in 1916 he was assassinated by Prince Felix Yusupov of the Bullingdon Club, an early example of its members’ fondness for intervening clumsily in political affairs. 

Enough said...

Dinner parties hosted by people like this have been ending very badly since at least 1916...

"Because they're morons"

Mark Blyth's take on the Brexit vote is harsh, bleak and and it isn't new. But it's as true now as it ever was.

Of course, the use of the phrase "morons" will provoke the usual tedious accusations about Remainer elitists sneering at the views of ordinary people. But if you listen, this is a more nuanced explanation of what happened and the "morons" in question include the UK's political and media elite who incubated the stupidity.

As for Mark himself, he didn't get where he is today because he belongs to some privileged elite. In his own words:

I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1967. I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense a “welfare kid”. Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.

Now check out the first three minutes or so of this video (if I've done this right, it should start playing about 49' 40" in):

Obscure trivia, pedantry and cake...

... are a few of my favourite things, so if course I was going to enjoy Simon Whistler's video on the history of the phrase "having your cake and eating it." My favourite piece of trivia was the fascinating detail that The Unabomber's pedantic habit of turning this phrase around so that it made more sense was one of the linguistic clues that finally revealed his true identity. If these are your sort of things too, help yourself to a slice...

Question: "How deep is your love?"

Answer (if you're Transport for London): "As deep as a fifteen floor building."

Geoff Marshall plumbs the depths:

False flag operation

On Wednesday, several British newspapers lamented that Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, had "decreed" that the British flag should no longer be flown over some public buildings to mark royal events, as if this:

a. mattered 

and

b. was true.

Horrified hacks at the Telegraph described how Nicola Sturgeon had "hauled down the Union flag",* while the folk in charge of the Express's clickbait bucket tried to raise the blood pressure of its more easily-triggered readers by describing the move as a "snub to the Queen".

It turns out that the story was nonsense from beginning to end (which isn't that surprising) and that one of the papers responsible for the disinformation, the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail, has actually apologised and published a correction, (which is):

"We are happy to clarify that the decision to change the policy on flag flying was taken and implemented by former First Minister Alex Salmond in 2010.

"The Protocol and Honours Team updated operational guidance in December 2017.

"We accept that the policy did not change under Nicola Sturgeon and that she had no involvement in the Protocol and Honours Team updating the operational guidance on flag flying for 2018."

*It is, by the way, great fun to troll the sort of people who ostentatiously call it the "Union flag" because it's "incorrect" to call it the "Union Jack",except when it's being flown on a vessel, because:

a. anyone who gives a monkey's is just asking to be wound up

and

b. they're wrong.

It is often stated that the Union Flag should only be described as the Union Jack when flown in the bows of a warship, but this is a relatively recent idea. From early in its life the Admiralty itself frequently referred to the flag as the Union Jack, whatever its use, and in 1902 an Admiralty Circular announced that Their Lordships had decided that either name could be used officially. Such use was given Parliamentary approval in 1908 when it was stated that “the Union Jack should be regarded as the National flag”. 

 Commander Bruce Nicolls OBE RN (Retired)

Furious celeb SLAMS Hull's Christmas trees as ISLAMIST PROPAGANDA

Any insufficient display of enthusiasm for things Christmas-related is usually cited, by members of the alt-right, as evidence for a mythical "war on Christmas" allegedly being waged by an improbable alliance of hard-line secularists and Islam's most inflexible God-botherers. The people behind this odd victim narrative have to get quite creative to come up with anything that looks like evidence for this apostate/heathenish plot (the zombie legend of Winterval, or subversive symbolism hiding on Starbucks coffee cups, among other outlandish claims), because of the overwhelming evidence that most people in the UK routinely celebrate Christmas without any fear of persecution.

Still, at least this means that if you do do something Christmassy, these silly people will get off your case, right? That must be what Hull City Council thought when they came up with the bright idea of decorating the anti-terror bollards around the city's Queen Victoria Square with Christmas trees. As a make-over, I think it works pretty well, but the local authority hadn't reckoned with the now-too-toxic-even-for-the-Daily Mail former reality star, Katie Hopkins, who tweeted, bizarrely:

"Do not use OUR symbols of hope to cover up for THEIR hate. Deport jihadi bastards."

Her (hastily-deleted) Twitter outburst is a useful way of reminding everybody else that there's obviously no pleasing these people, so there's absolutely no point in trying to appease, or reason, with them. Fortunately, now she's lost her soapbox at the Mail, it should be easier than ever to do the right thing and completely ignore Katie Hopkins and her incoherently ignorant opinions.

Appeal to authority

I'm hoping that UK-based cold callers will be deterred by a change in the law, making company directors personally liable for fines of up to half a million pounds for breaching the regulations intended to stop people being pestered with unwanted sales calls. Sadly, I expect that the pests will soon rise to the challenge of getting round the new rules.

Having said that, I'll probably never again come across another telesales racket more perfect than the people who cold called the unwary, promising to help them get rid of cold calls (for a fee). What the folk who made cold calls selling a cold call blocking service were doing was skimming a fee off unwary punters who didn't realise that there was a free service out there (in this case, the Telephone Preference Service).

Less paradoxical forms of this type of skimming are available. Somebody might, for example, ring you, suggesting that you might be paying too much Council Tax, due to your home having been placed in the wrong Council Tax band, and offering to check this, potentially SAVING YOU £££££!

The right thing to say at this point is that you can check your own band "in 10 minutes, at no cost" and appeal directly to your local Valuation Office Agency (VOA) if you think that your banding is wrong. If your appeal is rejected, but you still think your banding is incorrect, you can take your appeal further, to the appropriate tribunal.

It's all there on the relevant .gov.uk site, which is pretty clear and understandable (government websites get a lot of criticism - sometimes with good reason - but this particular one tells you what you need to know and I can't see much to moan about).

The wrong thing to do is to express any interest in the cold caller's service.

The wrongest thing to do is to give the cold caller your credit/bank card details. Not unless you want to receive a letter like this:

"Dear [your name here]

Claimers UK processed your payment of £65 for the administration fee but unfortunately  this transaction had been charged back by your bank informing us that you haven't authorised or participated in this transaction.
All our sales lines are recorded and we have evidence of you verbally agreeing to this transaction there for [sic] you are bound by the terms and conditions.

Shore claims have completed and finished [sic - how do "completed" and "finished" not mean the same thing?] your checks in regard to getting your council tax lowered.
But have not been paid for the work that has been carried out.

Please look up terms and conditions 2.4 on your policy paper work that was sent to you.

To arrange payment of this account please call us on 08448009426 or alternatively send in a cheque of [sic] the full amount of £65 to:
Claimers UK LTD, 7 Dukes Court, Bognor Road, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8FX.

If payment is not received by [insert deadline] we may recommend to Shore claims ltd that they commence legal  proceedings to recover the full outstanding balance. These actions may incur additional costs for which you may be held liable. 
Please do not underestimate the seriousness of this matter.

Yours sincerely,

[illegible scribble]

Account Manager
Claimers UK Ltd"

Devon and Cornwall Police issued a statement earlier in the year, warning people against such scams (specifically naming Claimers UK Ltd), and asking for individuals to report any offences to Action Fraud by calling 0300 1232040, or visiting www.actionfraud.police.uk.

I'm guessing that the people behind this operation are hoping that the person prospect who picks up the phone is elderly, trusting and not very confident about, or interested in, this newfangled Internet and therefore unlikely to discover, within a couple of clicks, that you can investigate this for yourself for free and go directly to the relevant authority to appeal, if you think there's a problem with your banding. In this case an appeal to (your local) authority isn't a logical fallacy - so long as you do the appealing yourself and don't outsource the process to some cold-calling skimmer.

Not that people from the generations that are used to finding stuff out with an Internet search should be too smug, as the skimmers are lurking on the Net, too. Up until quite recently, people who were in a hurry to renew their passports might have inadvertently clicked on a site with the same look and feel as the official .gov.uk passport renewal site, which actually belonged to a private company which skimmed off an admin fee for processing your passport request and forwarding it on to the correct authorities. It looks as if they've cracked down on that particular trick recently (when I googled "passport renewal" just now, the official site came up as the first search result - in the past, operators of lookalike sites have used SEO jiggery-pokery to make their sites appear above the official one in the search results), but it still pays to be wary.
 

The Volkswagen paradox

Here's another way to look at the former VW CEO's Rebekah Brooks-style claim that people at the top of his organisation had no idea about the systemic wrongdoing being perpetrated at more junior levels. Belle Waring finds this unbelievable, too, although following a directive from above must have meant that loads of people further down the corporate food-chain had to know, too, but all kept schtum for years, which is also pretty hard to believe:

I think cheating on this scale required, not just massive amounts of fraud, but a massive amount of complicity. No one at a lower level in the organization would take on the risk of freelancing a scheme of this nature. The benefits coming to you would be attenuated, and the danger would be great. This means that (minimally, some) people at the very top of the organization had to know about the software. Software powerful enough to determine when the car was being tested is complex and requires input from many sensors. This means (minimally, not a small number of) people had to know about the software. The person writing the proprietary code governing the steering wheel’s performance would have to be involved at least enough to have been told, “create an alert when the wheel hasn’t been moved in 2 minutes but the engine is running hard.” But it has always been my belief that, by and large, complex, dangerous conspiracies involving many people simply don’t happen. 

Read the whole thing here (the NYT piece which Belle references, is also good, highlighting the digital rights management angle on what was going on in VW's sealed black boxes).

Telling it like it isn't*

Ironic process theory or the white bear problem refers to the psychological process whereby deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts make them more likely to surface. An example is how when someone is actively trying not to think of a white bear they may actually be more likely to imagine one. 

I should have taken ironic process theory into account before  publically saying that I wasn't going to mention the individual I now have to refer to as Oink Balloon. Because Oink Balloon does throw up some darned interesting examples of psychological processes - and not just ironic process theory:

...when a person says something that isn't seen as "self-serving" or "normative" for the position that they're in, other people are not only more likely to think that those statements are what that person truly believes, but they're also more likely to feel more generally like they can know what that person is truly like deep down. It makes the person saying those things seem more "authentic." And it makes us more likely to feel like that person isn't lying. Even though Oink Balloon has given us just as many reasons as the other candidates to think that he's a "flip-flopper," the fact that he's not saying things that you would expect a politician to say means that his audience will be more likely to overlook those flip-flopping reasons and assume he's actually a truth-teller.

So, Oink Balloon isn't saying what you'd "expect" a politician in his shoes to say, and people are responding to this by calling it "refreshing" -- because it creates this feeling that, for once, they can really, genuinely know what someone running for office is actually like. But of course, this all relies on the assumption that Oink Balloon's comments aren't actually "self-serving." Given the enthusiastic response that he's received from some voters and the fact that his "controversial" comments seem to be gaining him fans, we can't really claim that these comments aren't self-serving, can we?

Writes Melanie Tannenbaum in Scientific American.

I've seen a similar psychological process going on in a novel** I read years ago. The plot revolved around a character, Bell, with some murky secrets. Everybody around Bell thinks she's a completely honest, open person, an impression Bell has engineered by being blunt to the point of rudeness. 'She'd hurt someone badly rather than lie to them', says one of her friends. In fact, Bell lies about facts all the time, but her friends and aquaintances can't see this, assuming that she's always honest because she spares nobody's feelings.

Or, as Melanie Tannenbaum puts it, 'non-normative statements are seen as more likely to be "true."'



*Not a bad title, IMO, but I have to admit that somebody beat me to it.

**The House of Stairs by Barbara Vine

Days of future past

Engineers at McDonnell Douglas have put forward ideas for a rocket-liner called Hyperion which they claim could carry passengers, 170 at a time, from one side of the globe to the other in just forty-five minutes by the 'eighties. A trip from Los Angeles to Honolulu would take eighteen minutes.
You don't believe it will ever happen? There was a time when wise men proclaimed that if God had intended men to fly He would have given them wings.

The concluding sentences of Aircraft, John W R Taylor's 1971 potted history of aviation. To the primary-school aged me, this sounded like a perfectly reasonable extrapolation of trends being forged in the white heat of Concorde-era techno-optimism. Which only goes to prove Neils Bohr's point that prediction is difficult, especially if it's about the future.

These days, there's still plenty of extrapolation going on, although sub-twenty minute flights from LA to Hawaii are mostly off the agenda, replaced by techno-utopian/dystopian futures in which the machines have either liberated humanity from toil and oppression, made their human hosts desire inexplicable products like Internet-connected fridges, trashed our jobs with automated obsolescence or terminated us in a swarm of rogue killer bots.

The only prediction I'm making is that most of these predicted futures will one day sound as quaintly retro as the term "rocket-liner" sounds today. As quaint, say, as this:

Fetch the howitzer! Some fool's armed the robot with a pistol!

Which sounds like a failed prophecy of some whimsical robopocalypse, although it's really a sentence from Schott's Miscellany, illustrating three words of Czech origin commonly used in English.

Salmond fishing in the prefects' common room

The Head Prefect has been giving one of the oiks a stern ticking off, bellowing that 'you are weak and despicable and want to crawl to power in Alex Salmond's pocket.' Well, that's him told.

Except, as any fule kno, Nicola Sturgeon has been the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, and First Minister of Scotland, since last November. Was the PM just getting a bit confused '(Sturgeon, Salmond ... I know it has something to do with fish?')? Or did Ms Sturgeon not register on his radar because she's a woman ('Of course I'm not sexist, calm down, dear!'). Or has the Conservative Party in Scotland been a lost cause for so long that they no longer know or care who they're up against? Or did he know about the change of leader, but choose to ignore it, because Salmond is a better bogeyman, having held the posts for long enough to make more mistakes and enemies than the new leader / First Minister?

Maybe he just realised that the idea of Ed trying to get into Nicola's pocket would only cause sniggering on the back benches.

I don't know, but it's not just the Prime Minister. Somebody also needs to have a quiet word in the ear of whoever's photoshopping the Conservatives' election posters:

I say, couldn't we find a better photo? That little chap looks nothing like Gordon Brown...

Vampire cannibals versus the raiders of Noah's Ark

Creative Commons image by Lawrence OP on Flikr

In the course of a recent controversy about (allegedly) Creationist-run free schools someone's raised a really good question which made me stop and think:*

But I was wondering more generally - what is it about creationism that matters so much?  We're only talking about a couple of (contradictory) chapters of Genesis here and believing these doesn't strike me as any more or less irrational than believing in the doctrine of transubstantiation, yet the Catholic Church already runs many more schools than 'creationists'.

Yes, a belief in transubstantiation certainly seems every bit as irrational as basing your notions of geology, biology, prehistory and paleontology on Genesis:

If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes will turn them into the body of Elvis Presley you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.

Clearly, the two beliefs are every bit as bonkers as one another. But there is an important difference that makes Creationism (AKA Intelligent Design) more pernicious and disruptive in the classroom. The difference is that there are people who believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation, but they don't have an organised alternative theory of 'Transubstantiationism' that sets itself up to challenge and overturn an established body of evidence-based knowledge. Let's recap what the Catholic Church has to say on the subject:

The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring:

"Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called Transubstantiation".

Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1376
 
Somewhere in this process, wafer and wine, apparently, becomes flesh and blood, in a way that is both literal yet also completely undetectable. After all, you don't see people at the altar rail gagging and spluttering as the taste in their mouth changes from indifferent house red to the unmistakable metallic tang of blood. Neither do they chow down on a bland wafer and sense their teeth closing on a gobbet of raw flesh. Nope, the Real Presence is both literally the body and blood of Christ, but also physically indistinguishable from plain old bread and wine:

Finally, transubstantiation describes how the physical qualities of bread and wine ‑ their color, texture, taste and whatever else is perceived by the senses ‑ remain, but they lose their substance. The qualities of bread and wine remain, but their substance is replaced by the whole Christ ... Since transubstantiation means the Real Presence of Christ, it also means the real absence of bread and wine.

An impressive trick - if you're the sort of person who'd be impressed by a stage magician who claims to be pulling invisible rabbits out of hats.

But there doesn't seem to be any elaborate theory about how God/Jesus does this stealth magic trick. It's just a mystery, a miracle. You don't get devout Catholic physics or chemistry teachers wanting to teach an alternative set of truths about the physical world and rubbish what the textbooks say about covalent bonds or the conservation of energy, in order to  push a more transubstantiation-friendly explanation of how the world works. As far as I can see, you can believe in transubstantiation and also believe that the world obeys the same set of physical laws accepted by scientists, educators and just about everybody else who paid attention in school. You just happen to believe that there's also a being who can suspend those laws at will and turn wine into blood that looks and tastes just like wine, but is absolutely, definitely, in a very real sense, blood, or make bread into flesh that that still looks like bread, but totally isn't, in a way that you can't really explain. That 'also' may be completely crackers, but it doesn't affect how you use a prism to demonstrate optics, or how you make a battery out of a lemon, or teach kids about any of the other phenomena of the non-supernatural world.

The late Stephen Jay Gould had a phrase that almost fits - non-overlapping magisteria. He believed that science and religion weren't necessarily incompatible, because "the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."

I've never bought into this argument myself, because, as far as I can see, religion explicitly claims to be more than just a mashup of metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy. As I read it, religion does make very specific claims about certain things being factually true and bases its authority and its moral teachings on those alleged truths. But, in some specific areas, there's a grain of truth in the notion of non-overlapping magisteria. The doctrine of transubstantiation, for example, scarcely overlaps with science or treads on its toes at all. It doesn't have anything to say about how the world normally works, but just makes an apparently untestable claim that there also exists an additional, inexplicable, undetectable piece of magic. Wafer and wine are somehow literally replaced by flesh and blood, but without undergoing any observable change. Unlike Creationism, transubstantiation is more or less untestable, un-disprovable and beyond the scope of scientific enquiry. Transubstantiation is just an odd conviction that exists within its own little self-contained bubble of faith, hardly impinging on the outside world or on the magisteria of science or education.

Creationism impinges big time, though. Even Stephen Jay Gould, who decided that his scientific world view didn't conflict with religion in general, got pretty riled when Creationists invaded his magisterium and parked their tanks on his lawn. Unlike transubstantiation fans, Creationists want to turn the curriculum upside down and replace a sound and successful evidence-based theory with their own bizarre attempts to make an incoherent bronze-age myth sound science-y.

And those attempts do get pretty bizarre. For example, it still astonishes me that some Creationists, in rejecting the existence of deep time and denying Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, have ended up coming up with their own idiosyncratic theory (theories?) of evolution. In their own words:

Organic evolution, as theorized, is a naturally occurring, beneficial change that produces increasing and inheritable complexity. Increased complexity would be shown if the offspring of one form of life had a different and improved set of vital organs. This is sometimes called the molecules-to-man theory—or macroevolution. Microevolution, on the other hand, does not involve increasing complexity. It involves changes only in size, shape, or color, or minor genetic alterations caused by a few mutations. Each example of macroevolution would require thousands of “just right” mutations. Microevolution can be thought of as horizontal (or even downward) change, whereas macroevolution, if it were ever observed, would involve an upward, beneficial change in complexity. Therefore, microevolution plus time will not produce macroevolution. (micro + time ≠ macro) 

Creationists and evolutionists agree that microevolution (and natural selection) occur. Minor change has been observed since history began. But notice how often evolutionists give evidence for microevolution to support macroevolution. It is macroevolution—which requires new abilities and increasing complexity, resulting from new genetic information—that is at the center of the creation-evolution controversy. Therefore, in this book, the term “organic evolution” will mean macroevolution. 

Center for Scientific Creation

I've added the bold type to highlight what I think are the key parts of this passage. Creationists know that people have undeniably seen changes in livings over time, in wheat, sweet peas, pedigree dogs, prize pigeons, fruit flies, peppered moths, bacteria and so on, so they are obliged to admit the existence of what they define (incorrectly) as 'microevolution'. They then go on to dispute the existence of 'macroevolution', (evolution by natural selection over longer periods aggregating small changes over long periods of time, leading, in combination with geographical isolation, to speciation). They don't believe in 'macroevolution' on the grounds that they can't imagine how 'changes only in size, shape, or color, or minor genetic alterations caused by a few mutations' could ever lead to increasing complexity or beneficial changes.

Their failure of imagination, though, doesn't add up to a demolition of the theory of evolution  by natural selection. It just proves that they've failed to understand the the theory. If this was because the theory was way too complicated for ordinary people to understand, I might have some sympathy. However, the basic outline they're wilfully failing to grasp here isn't advanced string theory and has been patiently explained by experts and educators time and time again, in terms that can be understood by any moderately intelligent adult with a basic education.

The Creationists' problem, remember, is that they can't imagine how random mutations could lead to beneficial changes or to increased complexity. The beneficial changes bit is easy. Mutations are random and can be harmful, neutral or beneficial, but need to pass through the survivability filter. Harmful changes will naturally tend to be weeded out because they'll make it less likely for an organism to survive and reproduce. Beneficial changes will help an organism to thrive and increase its chances of reproducing, so will tend to be passed on. Mutations that have no effect on survivability may also be passed on by default.

As for increasing complexity arising out of random changes, Stephen Jay Gould explained this one with a lovely metaphor that a child could understand. Imagine a drunk being thrown out of a bar, into the street. He's too hammered even to get himself the traditional tattoo or kebab, and can only stagger and lurch around in more or less random way. His random staggerings can take him in any direction, towards the brick wall and closed door of the bar from which he's been ejected, forward or back along the road, or over towards the other side of the street, or at any random angle to the above. If his staggers take him away from the bar, or on a path parallel with its wall, or veering away from it at an angle, he meets no resistance. If he staggers back towards the side of the bar, he crashes into the wall and can go no further.

The drunk's random staggerings represent random changes in organisms. These can randomly lead in the direction of greater complexity, less complexity, or no change in complexity. The wall of the bar is the 'wall of minimum complexity'. You start off with a simple, primordial organism, about as simple as a thing can get whilst still being independently alive. This organism can undergo random changes, but it's already about as simple as it can be, so changes can't go in the direction of greater simplicity. If it (or one of its offspring) tries to get any more simple than the simplest possible organism, it's going in a direction where it hits a wall, just like the rambling drunk. At any other point, organisms can go in any random direction - towards more complexity or less. Sometimes, ones that have already blundered far away from the wall will randomly move even further away, but there's no innate, underlying, drive towards greater complexity, just movement after movement in more or less random directions, with some happening to head towards greater complexity, a view that fits with the world as we see it, where there are a few very complex organisms a long way from the wall of minimum complexity, but the majority of lifeforms are still simple bacteria, diversifying away in their own random directions, somewhere near the wall.

Having rhetorically failed to imagine understand or imagine how evolution by natural selection might work, some Creationists then proceed to push credulity to the max with an account of what their version of evolution can allegedly accomplish in a few thousand years. For those Creationists who are also Biblical literalists, this all arises from the problem of how Noah got all those animals into his Ark. They start from the assumption that the Ark was obviously a real vessel, because it was in the Bible. They also notice that the number of terrestrial animal species that must have survived the deluge runs into many thousands.** How did Noah get them all in? Answers in Genesis kicks off by estimating the size of the ark, thus:

 The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits (Genesis 6:15)...

 The dimensions of the Ark are convincing for two reasons: the proportions are like that of a modern cargo ship, and it is about as large as a wooden ship can be built. The cubit gives us a good indication of size. With the cubit’s measurement, we know that the Ark must have been at least 450 feet (137 m) long, 75 feet (23 m) wide, and 45 feet (14 m) high. In the Western world, wooden sailing ships never got much longer than about 330 feet (100 m), yet the ancient Greeks built vessels at least this size 2,000 years earlier. China built huge wooden ships in the 1400s that may have been as large as the Ark. The biblical Ark is one of the largest wooden ships of all time—a mid-sized cargo ship by today’s standards.

Big, but still not big enough to accommodate tens of thousands of species of terrestrial vertebrates, the best part of a million insect species, plus assorted other land-dwelling invertebrates.This is where the Creationist version of 'microevolution' comes to the rescue:

In the book Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study,*** creationist researcher John Woodmorappe suggests that, at most, 16,000 animals were all that were needed to preserve the created kinds that God brought into the Ark.

The Ark did not need to carry every kind of animal—nor did God command it. It carried only air-breathing, land-dwelling animals, creeping things, and winged animals such as birds. Aquatic life (fish, whales, etc.) and many amphibious creatures could have survived in sufficient numbers outside the Ark. This cuts down significantly the total number of animals that needed to be on board.

Another factor which greatly reduces the space requirements is the fact that the tremendous variety in species we see today did not exist in the days of Noah. Only the parent “kinds” of these species were required to be on board in order to repopulate the earth. For example, only two dogs were needed to give rise to all the dog species that exist today. 

Creationist estimates for the maximum number of animals that would have been necessary to come on board the Ark have ranged from a few thousand to 35,000, but they may be as few as two thousand if the biblical kind is approximately the same as the modern family classification. 

Creationist 'microevolution' seems to do two things in Creationist theory (theories?). On the one hand it's a slow, difficult process that can't produce significant change and 'disproves' the Darwinian contention that evolution can ever produce immense diversity ('Microevolution ... does not involve increasing complexity. It involves changes only in size, shape, or color, or minor genetic alterations caused by a few mutations. Each example of macroevolution would require thousands of “just right” mutations ... whereas macroevolution, if it were ever observed, would involve an upward, beneficial change in complexity').

On the other hand Creationist 'microevolution' is an efficient, speedy process that produced immense numbers of new species from the limited number of 'kinds' ('families?') of animal packed into the Ark in a Noachian explosion of speciation, which happened over a mere 6,000-odd years. And these are the same folk who claim to find the idea of Darwinian evolution by natural selection over millions of years unbelievable?

Yes, and they're also the same folk who, in order to get around the problem of how Noah and his family cared for and provisioned a minimum of two thousands species for months on end, not to mention processing the inevitable tons of manure, hypothesise that the animals probably went into some form of shock-induced hibernation for the duration of the voyage:

Creation scientists suggest that God gave the animals the ability to hibernate, as we see in many species today. Most animals react to natural disasters in ways that were designed to help them survive. It’s very possible many animals did hibernate, perhaps even supernaturally intensified by God.

If you need any more convincing that these people have clearly lost their minds, these two excellent vids by 'Non-Stamp Collector', (which I've linked to before), should finsh the job:








All of this would be as amusingly irrelevant as transubstantiation, except for the fact that Creationists insist in bringing this rubbish into classrooms where important subjects are being taught. Transubstantiation is a piece of extra-curricular lunacy that doesn't interfere with teaching. Creationism is not only trying to muscle its way into how the life sciences are taught, but aims to replace the teaching of our best approximation of what is true with patent nonsense. Transubstantiation doesn't make an appearance in the classroom (except in religious education, and in the occasional historical reference,  where it belongs), so can be safely ignored. You can no more ignore people trying to push Creationism than you can ignore a delinquent teenager who persistently disrupts classes (in fact, I've more got sympathy with delinquent teens, who sometimes have valid excuses like immaturity, broken homes and raging hormones, unlike Creationists, who should be old enough to know better).

It's a distinction that all teachers should be able to get. Perhaps the fact that some don't is due to the fact that Creation 'science' doesn't impact all subjects equally. The historicity of Genesis, for example, may be highly questionable, but dodgy Near Eastern prehistory doesn't tend to put Creationists into direct conflict with history teachers trying to give kids the straight dope on Tudors and Nazis, or whatever the history curriculum consists of these days. As far as I'm concerned, an attack on one branch of knowledge is an attack on all. On that basis, I'm for excluding those delinquent Creationists from the classroom.

* Update - I've just edited and shortened the opening section of this post as the original, written in a hurry, took way too long to get to the point. As someone once said, 'I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one'.

** Well spotted, guys, but there's another thing that bothers me about your theory. There are also quite a few plant species that wouldn't survive a lengthy immersion in salt water (I'm helpfully assuming that the rising world ocean was still quite salty, as the problem of keeping relatively few fresh water species alive through a global flood would be a lot smaller than the difficulty you'd get if you had to fit the Ark with an oceanarium big enough to save all the creatures adapted to live in the salty oceans that cover 70% of the earth's surface). Yet I don't hear much about the ark as a floating garden centre. Sure, a few hardy seeds might have survived, but ask any arable farmer, keen gardener or allotment holder what chance their plants would have of surviving under several hundred metres of salty water for a few months and you can see a bit of a problem. How come pictures of the ark don't look like the floating gardens of Babylon?

*** This one must have made the short list for the world's' oddest  book title prize.

Idiots give Darwin a break

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Genesis 1:16

Interesting developments in the wacky world of religious fundamentalism. Hardcore Bible-heads in Waco, Texas, have been taking time out from their favourite pastime of furiously denouncing evolutionists as Satan's little helpers, only to take offence at a whole new group of scientists - astronomers and planetary scientists:

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun....

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled "We believe in God!" and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they'd always suspected.

To be fair, this article, which was strangely posted under "latest news" on the Butterflies and Wheels web site yesterday, first appeared on the Think Atheist blog in February 2009, but it's still pretty extraordinary. I wonder what would have happened if the speaker had been Neil Armstrong himself, providing eyewitness testimony?

Crazy Woman (angrily): We believe in God!

Armstrong: Ma'am, I've been there. I've stood on it and I've walked on it and I can assure you that it does not emit light. It's made of rock.

Would Crazy Woman have accepted his word, or would we have witnessed a new alliance between people who are crazy enough to believe in creationism and people who are crazy enough to believe that the moon landings were faked in a in a Hollywood studio?

Whatever. Assuming the Bill Nye incident actually happened and isn't a wind-up (the link to the original article in the Waco Tribune no longer works, but then it is old news), I'm pleased for evolutionary scientists, who can take a temporary break from explaining yet again how inescapably colossal the mountain of evidence supporting the Theory of Evolution really is. On the other hand I'm a bit sorry for astronomers, who already waste enough time debunking fools who keep challenging them to disprove astrology, however many times it's already been debunked...

The technicals strike back

In the fluid tug-of-war that defines this conflict, military movements have been characterised not by well-planned mass movements of armoured columns supported by air power, but by rapid dashes across the desert by lightly armed men in pick-up trucks and SUVs.

Frank Gardner, BBC March 2, 2011

It’s encouraging to see that the Libyan rebels have successfully seen off Gaddafi’s first attempted counter-attack. I don’t know enough about military matters to know whether or not to be further encouraged by the fact that Gaddafi seems to be relying heavily on a strike force of guys in pick-up trucks.

On the one hand, it seems strange. We know he’s got tanks and other armoured vehicles and he isn’t squeamish about slaughtering his own people when he deems it necessary. He’s operating on the sort of open terrain that lends itself to tank warfare (or at least it did when Rommel’s panzers and the Eighth Army were contesting it). Most of the rebels, (other than ex-soldiers) presumably don’t have tanks, or aren’t trained to operate any captured ones. If Gaddafi can’t, or won’t, use his armour he’s throwing away the sort of massive firepower advantage neatly summed up by Hilaire Belloc in The Modern Traveller:

Whatever happens we have got,
The Maxim gun, and they have not

He could be keeping his tanks in reserve for a last stand in Tripoli, but if the rebels break into the city at any point, he’d risk getting into the sort of street fighting where his tanks would become vulnerable to roadblocks and Molotov cocktails.

If most of the guys in the trucks are mercenaries, perhaps Gaddafi has figured his petro-dollars have bought their undivided loyalty, whereas his army tank commanders might feel a tad conflicted about rolling their tanks over friends, family and neighbours.

Or maybe it was just tactics. Assuming that they didn’t have to go off road all the way, I presume that a bunch of Toyota Hiluxes could have got to Brega a damn sight quicker than a column of tanks. If the pro-Gaddafi forces wanted to launch a surprise attack, maybe speed was of the essence. And let’s not forget that your pick-up trucks with big guns on the back (or “technicals” as they’re known in some parts) are cost-effective force multipliers, as western troops in Afghanistan have found to their cost.

If one of Gaddafi’s primary objectives is raiding and destroying any arms, ammunition and fuel dumps in rebel hands, maybe his fleet of “technicals” is the best force for the job – a modern equivalent of the Long Range Desert Group that cruised around the Libyan deserts giving Rommel a serious headache 70 years ago.

So, in the short term, I don’t know whether or not the lack of tank columns is a good indicator that Gaddafi’s losing his grip (on power – his grip on reality went decades ago) ,or just a matter of tactics. In the longer term, I’ve no idea whether the prognosis is good or bad. Salman Rushdie has just given an optimistic talk about the changes in North Africa and the Middle East, pointing out that Islamist militants don’t yet seem to be filling the vacuum left by toppling tyrants.

I really hope he’s right, but the Iranian Revolution was also started by a mixed popular front composed of liberals, communists, socialists, Islamists and everybody else who just hated a corrupt and brutal regime. It wasn’t long before the Islamist faction, the most ruthless, the most disciplined and the most organised element in the revolution took over and started hauling their fellow revolutionaries off to the Shah’s old prisons and torture chambers. As so often, the prize went to the revolutionaries who risked most, pitied least and had the highest boredom threshold:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Let's hope that the 2011 revolutions will consign 'the adoration of madmen' to history without moving on to 'the necessary murder.'

Horrible Histories - The Measly Middle Ages

The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a woman on the outside and lined with spikes. The front of the woman was composed of two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain in the bottom to let out all the blood.

So it goes

That's the straight dope, according to a character in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, who got his jollies by creeping people out with tales of  sadism and torture. The real Iron Maiden was apparently first used on August 14th 1515, to punish somebody who'd been forging coins. At least that's what Johann Philipp Siebenkees wrote in a 1793 pamphlet. Others beg to differ:

There is, however, one small problem with Herr Siebenkees’ story; it isn’t true. The first known references to the maiden appear in the late 18th century – besides Siebenkees’ pamphlet, a 1784 tour guide to Nuremberg allegedly whispered of “the Iron Maiden, that abominable work of horror that goes back to the times of Frederick Barbarossa” (by which it meant the 12th century). That guidebook might have referred to the infamous Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, which was destroyed in 1944, during the Allied bombing of Nuremberg. A copy of the Maiden, purchased by the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1890 and taken on a world tour, found its way back to Germany, and is now displayed at the Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg ob der Taube. Modern copies can be seen at Ripley’s Believe or Not and a variety of wax museums.

The Iron Maiden was probably made up by Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century medievalists and has as much to do with the real Middle Ages as Ivanhoe, the Pre-Raphaelites, Nineteenth Century Gothic architecture or the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.

These days, if you describe something contemporary as "medieval" it's rarely a compliment - the word carries connotations of barbaric cruelty and a sort of clunky crudeness. By modern standards the European Middle Ages really did have a crummy human rights record. It was an age that combined endemic warfare (those castles weren't just put there to look picturesque) with all manner of cruel and unusual punishments from impalement, death by burning, breaking on the wheel to hanging drawing and quartering. Not surprising if you buy Steven Pinker's compelling argument that the per capita of rate of violence has probably declined throughout our history in most places. With such an extensive buffet of real past horrors to choose from, it seems quite surprising that people felt the need to make stuff like the iron maiden up.

Another iconic medieval device is that spiked iron ball on a chain and stick that we've all seen knights bashing each other with in illustrations and and films. I haven't studied the various movie interpretations of Robin Hood and other medieval epics in any detail, but I get the distinct impression that when a character is armed with one of these in a film, it's a visual clue that "this person is a baddie" (the same seems to go for crossbows, unless your name's William Tell). The spiked ball and chain is popularly known as a morning star, although this is, apparently, incorrect and the term actually refers to a weapon that looks like a club with added spikes on the business end:

The morning star is a medieval weapon consisting of a spiked club resembling a mace, usually with a long spike extending straight from the top and many smaller spikes around the particle of the head. The spikes distinguish it from a mace, which can have, at most, flanges or small knobs.

The stick, chain and spiked ball affair is more properly called a military flail. According to Wikipedia, there's not much evidence that weapons like this were actually used in the Middle Ages although 'the weapon captured the imagination of later writers and illustrators, becoming a stock 'prop' in Victorian Era Medievalist literature and Hollywood movies set in the age of chivalry.' Wikipedia isn't always authoritative, but after a little light googling, I haven't found any killer article from an academic contradicting Wikipedia with hard proof of a real medieval weapon of the stick, chain and spiked iron ball-type. The nearest thing I've come across is the lash-ball, a ball of bronze or iron (without spikes)  attached by a lash to a stick  This weapon originated in Russia and was mainly confined to eastern Europe. So, the spiked ball on a chain was probably just another product of the overheated Victorian imagination.*

The real military flail was a bit more prosaic; often just a peasant's threshing flail, possibly souped up with a few studs or spikes on the end - the medieval equivalent of a nail-studded baseball bat. In an age when peasants were obliged to provide military service to their lords, it seems that sometimes they used whatever improvised weapons came to hand. When the peasants revolted, they took these crude weapons into battle on their own behalf - contemporary illustrations show Hussite peasant armies armed with flails and I'm sure that many a peasant grabbed the nearest flail during the English Peasants' Revolt.

If the Wikipedia article is correct, the agricultural flail must have been reasonably effective as a weapon, as modified versions were apparently purpose-built for fighting.

So the iron maiden almost probably didn't exist, evidence for spiked iron balls on chains is patchy - what about that other iconic medieval artifact, the chastity belt? Not looking good:

There are, in fact, no genuine chastity belts dating from medieval times: all known 'medieval' chastity belts have been produced in the first half of the 19th Century. These fake-medieval chastity belts are too heavy and the workmanship is too crude, even for medieval standards. The oldest design for a chastity belt that can be taken seriously dates from the 16th Century - but it's just a design, with no real working models believed to have ever been constructed. The concept of a chastity belt itself is a lot older, but it was usually used in poems in a metaphorical sense. According to Dr Eric John Dingwall, who wrote a deeper study on the subject in 1931, 'the chastity belt probably made its first appearance in ordinary use among the Italians of the period of the Renaissance or perhaps somewhat later.'

Most of the 'medieval' chastity belts on display in museums have been tested to confirm their actual age. As a result, the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremberg (Nürnberg), the Musée Cluny (officially known as Musée National du Moyen Âge, or the Middle Age Museum) in Paris and The British Museum in London have all either removed the chastity belts from their medieval displays or corrected the date.

Again, probably not a part of real life in the middle ages, although a brief Internet search on the term "chastity belt" confirms that plenty of firms today are kept busy satisfying the demands of rather specialist consumers and are probably manufacturing more chastity belts and associated restraining garments than have ever been made in any previous period of history.

 Why do these sort of myths gain traction? They've got a passing resemblance to modern media myths of the "Immigrants Are Eating Our Swans" or "Local Authority Bans Christmas" type - if you make up something shocking or dramatic enough, somebody's going to believe it without bothering to check. But most of the myths that get reported in the papers have some sort of not-very-subtle agenda behind them, whereas there's limited propaganda value in claiming that medieval Europeans tortured each other inside spiked cabinets, or bashed one another with spiky iron balls, or crusaders locked their wives up in steel knickers while they were away on heathen-slaying business. These myths are closer to unofficial urban myths - not the overtly political "Obama is a Muslim" rubbish, or the plain silly "Apple giving away FREE i-Pods" sort, but weird or frightening stories about people having their drinks spiked by organ thieves and waking up minus a kidney, or  The Vanishing Hitchhiker, just made up to freak people out.

These sort of myths don't have any overt purpose. Maybe they exist for the same reason that ghost stories, horror films, grisly waxworks and programmes like Embarrassing Bodies exist - people seem to like being a little shocked, scared or even grossed out in a safe environment. And half a millennium or so in the past counts as a pretty safe distance for a cheap thrill at a distant danger. 'People like to be scared when they feel safe' said Alfred Hitchcock. There are a lot of pop psychological explanations of why people like to be scared or take their imagination to a dark place - some of them might even be true. From visitors to the London Dungeons, through role playing gamers brandishing fearsome-looking "medieval" weapons to couples getting a naughty BDSM thrill from a spot of chastity belt role play, it seems that people still are still furtively turned on by the idea of medieval barbarity.

I suppose that people fantasizing about torture, oppression and violence, rather than doing it for real, is an indication that we've progressed a bit since the real Middle Ages.


* the Wikipedia article itself includes a photograph of something that is purported to be a 14th century stick-ball-and-chain-type flail in a Russian museum, but I don't know whether this real or just a reconstruction