That magnificent duffer in his flying machine

Just gone; 40 years since the first moon landing. Just coming up, 100 years since the first foolhardy daredevil crossed the English Channel in a heavier-than-air flying machine.

I use the words "foolhardy daredevil" advisedly. Reading his biographical details, Louis Blériot sounds like a bit of an aeronautical duffer, albeit a brave and persistent one. According to the Century of Flight entry I've just been reading, he was a pretty terrible pilot, clumsy , accident prone and had little grasp of aerodynamics, (fortunately, another aircraft engineer, Gabriel Voisin, helped out with some of his designs). In 1907, Blériot produced the world's first successful monoplane - although the term "successful" is quite relative in this context, as the aircraft was quite unstable and soon crashed. Other than this, there were quite a lot of failures and lots of crashes (Blériot seems to have belonged to the "any landing you can walk away from is a good landing" school of flying).

Then, the Daily Mail offered a £1,000 prize for the first successful flight across the English Channel. By then, Blériot had developed the Blériot XI (pictured above), a monoplane which had set a European record by staying airborne for over half an hour. Even so, when he borrowed some money for his cross-Channel attempt, the accident-prone Blériot was definitely not the favourite to be first across the water. Also in the running was the gentleman adventurer Hubert Latham, wealthy, Anglo-French heir to a banking fortune. Latham had a larger, more powerful aeroplane called the Antoinette, a large ground crew, a hanger and a generally well-funded, well planned operation. Also in the running was another well-heeled competitor, Count Charles de Lambert, trained to fly by the Wright brothers themselves and equipped with two Wright aeroplanes, considered at the time to be the world's best design.

As Ecclesiastes pointed out, the race is not always to the swift, and nobody's immune to time and chance. De Lambert crashed one of his planes on a test run and decided to drop out rather than risk the second one in a cross-channel attempt. This left the field open for the favourite, Latham, and Blériot.

Latham had the first shot at the Channel on July 19th 1909. Seven and a half miles out, the fatal flaw in Latham's smooth, well-funded operation became apparent - the Antoinette's engine, although big and powerful, wasn't all that reliable and cut out with Latham out over the sea. With considerable skill, he managed to land the Antoinette on the water. It floated and he sat nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he waited to be rescued, which he duly was. Latham's spirits weren't dampened by his experience and arranged to race Blériot across the channel as soon as a new Antoinette was made ready and the weather was good enough. Good weather was forecast for the morning of July 25th, so the two men arranged to fly at dawn, Latham effortlessly confident of victory. Unfortunately for Latham, his engineer failed to wake him up at the arranged time of 3.30am.

Blériot, although suffering from burns from a racing accident was up in time. He took off just after half past four in the morning. He was hampered by being ill, having no navigational aids, and practically no instruments in his plane and probably by the aerodynamic drag of his unfeasibly bushy walrus moustache. For a while, after he lost sight of landmarks, was alone with the sea and the sky; "I am alone. I can see nothing at all. For ten minutes, I am lost", he said. The weather began to deteriorate with winds and gusts of rain. But the little Anzani rotary engine kept going and eventually Blériot spotted the English coast ahead. Shortly after that, he crash-landed into a field and the underdog became an international celebrity, (those were the days, when you became a celebrity by doing something remarkable, rather than just by appearing on some vacuous reality TV show).

Centenary celebrations are planned in France and Britain.

Quote of the day

... as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Excellent. I wish I'd said that. Come to think of it, I probably will.

Free your mind

Blogging's been light recently - I've been quite busy with one thing and another (although that's not necessarily the same thing as being productive). I've been reading Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, the book of the newspaper column. It would have been an entertaining read if Goldacre had simply pointed at some of the more bizarre claims of Complementary and Alternative Medicine and laughed. In fact I'd be a bit worried about anybody who couldn't see the funny side of claims that wearing a bit of quartz round your neck, sticking a candle in your ear, or putting a hosepipe up your bottom represent new "wellness paradigms" or some such nonsense. Taking the mick out of the more obviously wacky side of CAM is easy (although no less entertaining for all that), but Goldacre tackles some more tricky targets, in particular, high profile nutritionists.

These people are harder for the lay person without any scientific training to spot. They've been called the stealth bombers of the CAM movement, deploying the sort of words a real scientist or medical professional might use - vitamins, trace elements, enzymes, proteins and antioxidants, rather than showing up on the nutter radar by ranting on about chakras, meridians, auras and electromagnetic vibrational systems. I must admit to having been taken in myself, having taken a look at a copy of Patrick Holford's The Optimum Nutrition Bible a few years ago.

To my shame, after a not very rigorous skim through a few chapters which I thought might be relevant, I gave his book the qualified benefit of the doubt (fortunately I've been in generally good health, so I didn't feel obliged to read any of his advice with great attention, but I might have given it a try if I'd had some of the symptoms of the conditions he attributed to suboptimal nutrition). Reading one of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science columns about Holford, some time later, it began to dawn on me that I'd been had. I could have read more about exactly was wrong with Holford, but I wasn't sufficiently interested in health and "wellness" issues to follow it up - I was aware of the, the Holford Watch site, but didn't spend any time on it, partly because the the various single-issue "watch" sites sound a bit obsessional to me. Which is a pity, because the Holford chapter is a gem.

It was humbling but instructive to read Ben Goldacre taking The Optimum Nutrition Bible apart in detail, picking out such choice nuggets as:

• cherry-picking the data to support his conclusions
• citing flawed, and now retracted papers by a discredited researcher
• over-interpreting the results of valid studies to make claims the researchers wouldn't recognise
• a claim that doses of vitamin C are more effective than AZT in treating AIDS
• making dramatic claims, (for example that giving autistic children doses of vitamin A has an extraordinarily beneficial effect on their social interactions) without any references
  
• reassuring the reader by throwing in the occasional piece of commonplace, common-sense dietary advice among the impressive-looking tables, diagrams and technical-sounding stuff about hormones, lipoproteins and digestive enzymes.
  

Underneath the sometimes plausable-sounding complexities, it's really simple - The Optimum Nutrition Bible is a book by a supplement pill salesman, explaining how most of our medical problems can be solved by eating more supplement pills.

In reality, better minds than Holford's are confused by the intricacies of diet. As Goldacre points out, in theory, ingesting more antioxidants sounds like a good idea. When the idea is tested in trials, the results suggest that there's no beneficial effect from increasing your antioxidant intake - in fact, high levels may even be harmful. In reality, the best advice is the stuff that's simple and easy to understand - eat a varied diet, including plenty of fruit and veg, don't smoke, don't drink too much alcohol, take exercise. It might not be easy to do, but it's easy to get your head round - so chuck out the spin and over-complication, along with the pills the nutritionists would love you to buy and free your mind.

There's lots more good stuff in Bad Science about the relationship between medical science, flawed medical science, PR, the media, pharmaceutical companies torturing the data to push the latest miracle cure and much, much more. It's a piece of hard investigative work and clear thinking that stands head and shoulders above much of the reflexive "churnlism" that propagates so much of the misinformation Goldacre uncovers.

After being so easily taken in by Holford, maybe I am getting the message. One of the pharmaceutical companies' tricks, pointed out in Bad Science is the medicalisation of an ever-greater range of conditions which were formerly just normal, if sometimes unpleasant, parts of life (inventing a syndrome to fit a pill they just happen to have). In one of his recent columns Ben Goldacre notices the invention of Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder as the latest example of this trend. A while ago, with less style, knowledge and insight, I noticed the same thing - this reassures me that I do occasionally pay attention.

It came from the veg patch

After last year's venture into Chard, this year's slightly unusual vegetable is kohlrabi. It's not a big crop, but here's the first one we've harvested. I wasn't sure what to do with the alien-looking tentacled purple blob , so mashed it up roughly with carrots. It wasn't a taste revelation, but it was quite pleasant, which is more than we can said for last year's chard, which grew vigorously, but was a bit of a penance to eat. Somebody on line claimed that chard stalks were a bit like asparagus, although I can tell you from personal experience that you'd be about as likely to confuse chard stalks with asparagus as you would be to mistake the Eiffel Tower for a fun-sized Snickers bar.

Flagging interest

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum"

Arthur C. Clarke

Greetings, fellow earthlings! The image above is a design for the Flag of the Earth, created by James W. Cadle in 1970, in the wake of the first Apollo moon landing. It features a stylised section of the sun's disc, a blue circle representing the earth and a smaller white circle for the moon. It's an interesting alternative to the other coloured scraps of cloth that humans are always squabbling over and deserves another showing, with the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 coming up.

I started looking at flag-related trivia after reading Flags of Forgotten Countries at Dark Roasted Blend (an article from which I pinched the Arthur C Clarke quote above). Among many other factoids, I discovered the origin of the two-headed eagle that became a symbol of Russia under the Tsars (and has been rehabilitated by the nationalists in the present Russian Federation). I'd always thought that this mutant bird looked a bit odd, but didn't know why it had two heads. The reason, apparently, is that the bird was first used on a Byzantine standard. It was a version of the Roman Eagle, the two heads, symbolising the fact that the Byzantine Empire looked both west to Europe and east to Asia. Here's a version of one of the the original Byzantine double-headed eagles, the emblem of the Palaiologos dynasty:


After the fall of Constantinople, Byzantine refugees ended up in Moscow, where their Imperial symbol was adopted by their Russian Orthodox coreligionists. At various times, this funny-looking bird has also been adopted as a national symbol by Albania, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Montenegro, Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, among others.

Don't let them eat cake

On the whole, I'm not impressed by the UK's catering and hospitality industry. Things may be improving, but over many years, the dismal food served in chain pubs and restaurants helped to secure the UK's reputation as a food-hating nation, whilst the the industry contains many employers who treat their staff disgracefully.

I was therefore saddened, but not surprised to hear a recent example of corporate catering bastardy from my own neck of the woods. There's a small nursery on the Open University campus in Milton Keynes used mainly, but not exclusively, by children of Open University staff. In order to raise money for the nursery, nursery staff and parents came up with the idea of having a cake sale. A little bit of home-made victoria sponge or carrot cake to raise a few pennies for a nursery looking after pre-school kids. What could be more innocent and wholesome? What sort of petty-minded, nasty, pompous, killjoy jobsworth could possibly object? Step forward the company responsible for the Open University's catering (appointed as the result of a catering "Strategy", involving a "Proposed Ideal Food Model" intended to " support the process of consumer focus", with references to "menu and market engineering" something called "Operating Buzz" and similar abominations of marketing jargon)

Anyway, the corporate catering behemoth thusly appointed, proceeded to go puce in the face and wave a badly-drafted catering contract under everyone's noses, pointing out that it was the only entity entitled to sell food on campus and claiming that a little cake stall would damage corporate profits. They probably dragged health and safety concerns into the mix somewhere as well. Arseholes. And their food's not much cop, either.

IDiocy update

Hip, hip!

Climbdown on compulsory ID cards


Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports

Hooray!

But...

However, in a statement, the campaign group No2ID said the "humiliating climbdown" was not the end of the scheme.

"It's just part of the ongoing attempt by senior Home Office officials to fortify the scheme against cancellation and to bind the hands of a future government," the statement added.

Well, modified rapture, anyway...