We Are The Free

Alas, I was unable to go to Soul Survivor this year (yes, I’m still talking about 2011 – how old school am I?) but for Christmas (Merry Christmas, by the way) I managed to get a copy of the album, having decided that Christian music is not a total write-off.

I should probably explain what Soul Survivor is. It’s a Christian Youth/Camp/Conference/Worship event held in the summer. Lots of youth-type Christians (there are far too many of us) turn up and spend five days screaming their heads off at live worship bands (OMG TIM HUGHES IS SO HOT CHRISTIANLY) and generally learning about the finer points of religion. It’s Richard Dawkins’ worst nightmare – children willingly volunteering to be brainwashed into some sort of malicious cult. I know, right.

So Tim Hughes, who is probably the Christian equivalent of the Beatles, but more popular (we’re only slightly smaller than Jesus!) wrote a song entitled We are the Free. It’s quite good actually, with clear hip-hop influences, and a good sense of fun.

But the interesting line, and the purpose of this post, is the line ‘we are the free, the freedom generation’. Which is trite, but has intriguing connotations.

Revolution seems to have become a recurring theme in Christianity recently. Let’s face it, we’ve dedicated our lives to becoming more like a man who, on a trip to the local temple, decides to destroy the local market stall. However, it does seem to be growing stronger. Recently, a speaker at the Christian festival ‘Spring Harvest‘ proclaimed to the youth that he imagined us to be the start of something big and new in the Christian faith. For Spring Harvest, that’s quite a big proclamation. Equally, we find words like revolution and generation are picking up – the unashamedly dance track ‘Dancing Generation‘ springs to mind.

And this is honestly the first year where the world outside of Christianity seems to have picked up the call of revolution. The Arab Spring has been the biggest news of the year, closely followed by the economic crisis. On top of this, revolutions have been occuring everywhere from eReader technology to anti-capitalist protestations. Even the Big Society will be coming back, according to my sources.

I know that the end of the year is traditionally a time to talk about revolutions and change, but I don’t really remember quite this much excitement as 2010 closed. Indeed, if you told yourself then everything that was going to happen in 2011, I strongly suspect you’d have been met with a lot of cynicism. We do seem to be standing much closer to the brink of something new than we have stood for at least a decade.

So I’m going to ask: Is this a good thing? It’s an odd question, but humans aren’t very good at change. Someone famous once said ‘people hate any sort of change that doesn’t clink in their pockets’. So we have to decide objectively if, perhaps, this sort of change is good. And if so, we need to try and forget our inhibitions and go for it, wholeheartedly.

The question has many parts to it, but perhaps the most formost issue should be if this change is going to work. When the people of Egypt rose up, there was much rejoicing in the streets, but already the people are rising up again to protest against the government that was put in place after the previous regime. Even in Libya there is not yet peace. If we look at the Occupy movement, we remember the disasters of some of the American groups. Here in the UK, Occupy London Stock eXchange has stayed around, but I hear repeatedly from my sources within the one percent who they are supposedly targeting that they are coming to nothing. As for the banking crisis forcing any long-term change for the better, well don’t make me laugh. The only revolution we’ve seen is the one that is about to break up the European Union. Indeed, the only revolution that seems to be working is the eBook one, and that’s still meeting ferocious opposition.

But then revolutions were never supposed to be easy. We can look at everything from the other side. In Egypt the people are rising up against the forces of oppression. OLSX has remained, and has many plans for the coming year. The banking crisis has shocked many people. We could well argue that we’ve done the hard bit. We’ve had the actual revolution, we just need to make sure what’s coming out the other side is right.

But when we think about whether the revolution is a good thing, we do have to recognise that a revolution needs the power. So part two of this question is whether there are enough of us taking part to make this work. Maybe that’s a subset of the previous question. Tough, I’m going to approach it seperately. Because this is where I’m going to link that religious nonsense at the start of this post with the revolutionary nonsense at the end of this post. You see, there are a large number of Christians in the world. A smaller percentage than there once was, perhaps, but I believe Christianity is still the largest religion in the world. No imagine all of those people supporting the revolutions. We are technically meant to be quite good at revolting. We’re also meant to be quite good at helping others. So let us, as the worldwide family of Christ, look at what we have been called to do. Help revolting people. That may not have come out right. Rather, we should help other people who are taking part in revolutions.

Alternatively we could just ignore the differences in religion, and compare the numbers of religious people in the world to the numbers of people who aren’t religious. That’s over half of the population of the world. If all of those people were working for change, we’d have a majority, which is a good thing. Go democracy.

Indeed, if you’ll bear with me for a moment, why leave it there? So extend our grouping to all those who are in the least bit spiritual. Indeed, being spiritual is a bit of a harsh cut-off point. What about those people who just haven’t thought about it enough to form a direct opinion? They’re practically religious. Indeed, if we’re going to invite them, why not just go the whole hog and invite all the avowed atheists. Yes, even Richard Dawkins is allowed to join in our revolution. And we won’t even send him to Soul Survivor. Well, maybe once. But only in the spirit of fun. And we’ll show him the back door so that he can escape.

I think, in terms of religion, we’ve just about covered everybody. And, what with there being seven billion people in the world, that’s a lot of people who are helping each other to revolt.

I suppose, when it comes down to it, whether the revolution is a good thing is up to you. Personally, I really don’t like money, so I’m not desperately enamoured by the economic turmoil that is happening. Even OLSX leaves me cold sometimes.

But there are some things which do excite me. Freedom for thousands of people in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Climate Change. And it might not be desperately loved as a tool of the political revolutions, but there are some quite exciting things happening in physics at the moment.

I remember someone, probably a youth worker of some description, told me that God places a burden for something on everyone’s heart. In non-Christianspeak, this means that we each get something to be passionate about, we get the tools to be passionate about it with, and all we’ve got to do is be passionate. It doesn’t translate over well to the secular world, which is a shame, because it’s a nice idea, but I would like to think that you understand what I’m on about. Some things are important to certain people, other things are important to others. So what I want you, my loyal followers, to do is to find your revolution. Then decide, is this revolution right? Is it a revolution that will succeed? Is there enough of a volume to make it happen? And will the results be worth the fight? And if so, loyal followers (I feel like I’m leading a cult now. Johz for next North Korean leader!) then take up that fight. Let 2012 be the year that the world changes.

Happy New Year!

10 Things to do with Prospecti

A Prospectus for the University of Lincoln, no less...

So I’ve ended up cleaning out my room. I’ll admit it was under duress, and with much help, but my bedroom is, conventionally at least, tidy. I’ve got to admit I prefered it before. Previously, all my stuff was somewhere on a shelf or on the floor. Now I have no idea where anything is. However, I am sure that I will be able to turn the place into the disgusting pig-sty that it used to be in no time.

One of the things this makeover produced was a very nice set of this year’s university prospectuses. These paperback books, ranging in size from A4 to A5, each have about 200 pages, so they’re impressive tomes, in general, and are far to good to waste. However, you can sometimes struggle to know what to do with them.  Conventionally at least, they are a single-use item.

However, Johz is about to relieve all the misgivings you have ever had about them, with today’s blog post: It’s ten things that you can do with a used prospectus!

1- Draw faces on everyone. Obsessively. Think of it as doodling practise. What if, next time you visit an art gallery, they turn round and say that their most prized work has been spirited away by evil yet certainly quite civilised crooks? This practise will almost certainly improve your drawing skills so that you will be able to turn round and draw something that far surpasses the previous work. You’ll become an instant hit. All the best galleries will hunger for you. You’ll be able to have dinner with the likes of Janet Street-Porter… On second thoughts, probably best to keep the talent under wraps.

2- Papier mache. Another more creative idea, you could create anything that your mind can imagine. Make a wire-frame model of the thing you want to produce. Use chicken wire for this. Alternatively, make it out of plastic pots or balloons or the like. Then just tear your prospectus into small strips, and cover them liberally with a mix of PVA glue and water. Then stick them onto your model, making sure it’s covered all over. Leave to dry, then add another layer. It helps if you use different colours here so that you can see where you’ve already been. Keep on doing this until you think it’s strong enough. Then paint. Unless for some reason you really like the colour of your prospectus.

3- Prevent all that mess. The last idea is probably going to be quite messy, so while you’re at it cover the work surface with pages ripped out of another prospectus. Two birds in one stone!

4- Paper aeroplanes. It’s an old schoolboy favourite, but it’s always fun to get a plane to go really far. The world record is 27.6 seconds of flight, which should be easy enough for anyone with enough prospectuses. Alternatively, try and work out the best shape for doing tricks. Think outside the box – some of the best ones I’ve seen are circular in shape. This is practically research physics, so take time off school/work to do this. No-one will mind, I’m sure.

5- Origami. Yes, that last idea was a bit condescending. I should have realised you’re already a world-champion paper plane maker. Have you ever tried origami, however? Just like paper planes, origami involves taking pieces of paper, or pages of a prospectus, and folding them to produce the desired shape. Unlike paper planes, however, you can make all sorts of objects, not just flying ones. Like cups. or houses. Or even flowers. Cheaper than real ones, and probably more pretty, and certainly better made than real flowers. Tell that to your loved one…

6- Light a fire. Perhaps you’re a bit too manly to be wasting your time making origami models? In which case, please slap yourself for such a rude and blatant show of misogyny. How rude. However, you might want to get rid of your prospectus by burning it on your barbecue. Use small pieces with lots of rips in them, making sure that the fibres are well exposed so that when you strike your flint against them, the sparks have something to catch light against. Then have lots of small sticks to add on top of this. Keep on adding larger and larger bits of wood until you’ve got a decent-sized log on the barbecue. This will give your food a nice smokey flavour. Probably.

7- Keep out zombies. What do you mean you don’t have a flint? Oh, you mean you’ve attached it onto a gas canister to make the flamethrower that you keep in case of a zombie apocalypse. Well in that case, you might as well build a really nice defensive firewall to keep them out. Get some large chain-link fencing, the type that you get around old building yards and that anyone, even zombies, can scramble over really easily. You know the stuff. Then tie lots of little bits of prospectus to the links, so that the whole thing is covered in ribbons of paper. Then cover the whole thing with the PVA glue mixture you used in suggestion 2. Cover the resultant mess in more pieces of prospectus. Repeat until the fencing is completely covered with a solid mass of prospectus. You may need a prospecti. When the zombies attack, cover the whole thing in petrol, then set alight. It should burn for some time. I think.

8- Build the highest tower. Sometimes you really need an activity to do with a group of hormone-ravaged teenagers that is designed to encourage teamwork and social interaction. For this you will certainly choose to do the challenge where the aim is to build the highest tower out of a few scraps of newspaper. Well STOP! Use your head, and use your prospectus. Indeed, give each team a prospectus, and some sellotape. I myself am always finding myself in this situation, especially while wandering down the local High Street, so I carry at least three prospecti about my person at any time.

9- Make a historical artifact. Go out there and do something truly amazing. Something unbelievable. Solve neutrinogate. Prove that the sum of any two numbers is another number. Compose something so breathtakingly beautiful that people will waste away before it, unable to tear themselves away from the brilliance. Write a book. And, as you’re doing so, make sure you use your prospectus as notepaper. In five hundred years’ time, a historian will turn to Giles Brandwith on saturday night television and say “well this is the paper on which he did perhaps his most influential work in the early part of the twenty-first century.” And Giles will nod sagely and say “yes, I did like the twenty-first century. Prefered the late sixteenth, but then of course, that was when I met the missus, and she wouldn’t like it if I forgot that…”.  Because Giles Brandwith is immortal. I swear it. I’ll prove it, if you give me enough prospecti…

10- Wallpaper your room. The yellow pages in this video are formula books for mathematics, including hundreds of tables of numbers based on the normal distribution, random numbers, and all the other bits of statistics you never wanted to know about. There is a severe excess of them, so it’s good that some people took the initiative and did something useful with them.

If you enjoyed some of the more crafty suggestions in this post, then try the new site The Crafty Mother, from the wife of that wonderful spokesperson for all those who work on the front line of the hotel industry, the Hook.

Auntie Beeb and Dave

BBC iPlayer: God's gift to the television-difficient and people who are just lazy... Image via Wikipedia

The BBC is a beautiful organisation. On one hand, it is a tax that falls on anyone who owns a television. On the other, however, it produces extremely good entertaining, thought-provoking, informative, exciting television and radio, innovates constantly (remember iPlayer?), provides a brilliant educational resource for school children, provides information about national issues, sets standards for other broadcasters, has a top-quality sports website, amazing and innovative science pages, and also does Doctor Who. However, on top of all of these, it has the BBC news website, where reliable, informative and generally fairly bias-less news is reported regularly with comments from professionals, helpful information to provide insights, and complete rigour on what is being reported. It’s hard to complain about value for money.

The news site is what I want to talk to you about. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news is perhaps the last word in high quality news. It is manned by a series of extremely capable journalists, and monitered for bias. It is completely free, and provides news on all sorts of topics. It also allows comments on many of the articles, allowing users to discuss and share opinions, provoking much debate.

However, where there is comment, there is also a singular type of character that we will call Dave. You probably don’t know much about Dave, but you will recognise his style of comment. For example, on the subject of the death penalty, he might discuss how typical the left-wing bias of the BBC is, and move on to suggest that anyone who doesn’t want the death penalty should be locked up in a house with all the murderers in the UK and see how they like it. Dave will probably find a way to mention the riots in the summer of 2011 in any post he makes.

I decided that I wanted to explore Dave as a person, and, more importantly, his commenting style. Is it possible that it could be replicated by someone called Bertie, for example? So now let me introduce you to Dave.

The most important thing to understand about Dave’s commenting style is that the content of the article he is commenting on doesn’t matter. Far more important is the comment that Dave is about to make. This allows Dave the luxury of writing his post at any time, with or without any access to the internet. Indeed, even during a casual chat with Dave, he may be writing anything up to two dozen comments in his head, and storing them away for future reference.

When Dave actually get onto the BBC news website, the first thing he does is look for comments. Not all articles can be commented on, so he must find the right article, lest he by stymied in his act by what he would term the liberal media conspiracy. This, of course, would just make him more angry.

A few sidepoints should be noted on the subject of Dave’s anger here. Dave is, contrary to popular belief, not a particularly angry person. Most of the time, he doesn’t beat animals, and often goes out of his way to ensure that his actions do not harm others. However, and this is a medical condition that affects many people across the world, on contact with the internet, he immediately is filled with a sense of rage and anger with everything in the known universe, especially communists and socialists.

After Dave has found an article, he begins his commenting process by looking at the headline, and reading the first few lines of the article. However, he is physically only able to read a couple of lines of the article before his skin comes out in a rash, and he struggles to breath. This condition is usually refered to as liberalitis, and is extremely common, and largely curable by exposure to large amounts of common sense. Sadly, this treatment is not available to most people.

Due to this condition, Dave will not be able to understand the entire article, and certainly not the finer points of its impartiality and balance. However, this doesn’t matter because Dave has evolved the ability to go beyond this. Based on just the title and a couple of key words, Dave will search his repetoire of pre-written comments, and find the one that is most appropriate, or, alternately, the one that he likes the most. The latter usually does not relate to the article in question, and is quite often a rant about how the death penalty should be applied to anyone who rioted ever. However, this rarely bothers Dave.

This is not actually the complete picture. Sometimes Dave has a comment that he cannot wait to share, for example one that suggests that the BBC are organising a conspiracy regarding Jeremy Clarkson and the Eurozone. In this case, he will scan the main page for any headline that leaps out at him, then immediately write down his comment, regardless of how appropriate this is. However, being as most of Dave’s comments could apply to almost any subject, it may well be in the right place. Alternatively, and probably more akin to Dave’s style of thinking, Dave is completely right. The liberal media, however, have got the subject wrong.

It is perhaps intriguing to the casual observer how the Dave, who quite clearly hates the disgusting huge leftwing bias on the BBC, is so addicted to the site. However, after one spends some time with Dave, one starts to understand his reasons behind this.

For a start, Dave is a hero, indeed sometimes, if his comments are removed, he can be a martyr. He fights daily, valiantly, to take down the monstrous ogre that is the BBC. His comments are his weapon of words, his pen that is so much more mighty than any sword, although not as mighty as common sense. He can wield them in such a way as to cast doubt on our reverence of authority figures such as scientists, fill us with hatred over the summer rioters, or even just to demonstrate that the BBC is an evil liberal conspiracy.

Secondly, Dave craves attention, and the BBC’s redactive moderating policy provides the perfect opportunity for to provide this attention. He need but insult an entire ethnic group (something Dave is very good at doing) and he could find his comment being removed, leading to him being able to place a good three more comments on complaining about the liberal conspiracy and political correctness gone mad. Dave does love political correctness gone mad.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, Dave’s comments are strong even for such heights of right-wing anger as the Daily Mail forums. Indeed, he was almost certainly banned from that stronghold of conservative thought about a week ago, and has nowhere left but the BBC and Sarah Palin. And Dave will be damned if he’s going to kowtow to an American.

Life Isn’t Fair

Vanilla ice-cream. A perfect example of inequality in the world. But so, so tasty... Image by stevendepolo via Flickr

Life isn’t fair. It’s something I’m sure you’ve heard many times before. And let’s face it, many things aren’t fair. Why should one child be bought ice-creams by their parent and the other one left out because ‘ice-creams are for holidays’? Admittedly that one is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and comes directly from my own mournful childhood, but I’m sure you can add in your own scenarios, both imagined and real.

This isn’t just a light-hearted issue, though. In terms of national and international interests, it’s quite a biggie. Today children are being born in areas of desperate need, to mothers who may well go on to contract HIV/AIDS, with little access to fundamentals such as clean water, education, proper sustenance. Yet I, and probably you, sit here with access to plentiful supplies of food, beverages of an enormous variety, education that is so common that we dare to complain about it, and, on top of this, luxuries such as the internet and computers. When you think about it, it’s not hard to make those magic words come to your lips: “Life isn’t fair.”

The word for this, as I’m sure well-educated, civilised members of the world society like you know, is inequality, and it has become a bit of a buzzword. But the phrase itself is more than an admission of this inequality in the world. In its most common usage, it is a philosophy. I Think Therefore I Am. Free Will or Determinism. Life Isn’t Fair. It is a fundamental belief in the nature of the universe, a world view, te fire that casts the shadows of the world onto the dim cave wall that we stare at. Yes that was a Plato reference.

As a wannabe physicist, I should point out that it’s not a great conclusion to draw. The scientific process doesn’t back it up much. If we start with the observation that there seems to be a lot of inequality in the world, we may produce it as a hypothesis, but do the fundamental laws of the universe really cause the inequality we see around us? We should be able to test the hypothesis, and, while it is hard to do so empirically, there is some evidence that fairness doesn’t entirely enter into the equation. Take Einstein’s conclusion that light can curve in the presence of large amounts of gravity. This can be shown by looking at stars as the sun passes through the sky – they change position slightly as the sun acts as a massive lens, distorting our image. The problem here being that when the sun passes through the sky, we can’t see the stars at all. An example of life being unfair? Not at all – life provides an extremely convenient solution in the form of a complete solar eclipse.

But we cannot deny some aspects of inequality. My old Sunday School education does not let me down in reminding me that everyone is slightly different – just look at your fingerprints. And someone else’s for comparison. And we all have different abilities – I adore physics, but there are, apparently, people who feel the same passion for maths, politics, medicine, even modern foreign languages. It’s not hard to look around you and see that different people have different skills, and, as the bin men have shown numerous times while taking industrial action, even high arts and academic philosophy requires that there are people making sure that the basics are tended to.

But is this really inequality? We can point fingers and note that the man on the factory floor doesn’t earn nearly as much as the managers in the boardroom. But then, were we to perform a spot economics test, we might be able to hint at the reason. And would one of the managers be able to solder a three-eighths gripley to the double-tandem chasse joint? Do you have any idea what I just wrote there? I don’t. So we do have different skills.

There are, of course some problems. I suspect that if we looked at heritage in terms of socio-economic factors (by which of course, I mean asking if a person’s parents were poshos) we might see an interesting pattern when plotted against pay scales. But things can be done to alleviate that issue – good schools and mechanisms to prevent discrimination in terms of universities can play large parts in socio-economic progression. Equally, there are differing amounts of positive and negative stigma attached to different areas of the job market, many of which are not necessarily helpful. Indeed, almost all of which, except for the bankers. Everyone knows that bankers are evil.

So we need to work to ensure equality. Maybe this is a sign that inequality is fundamental law of nature, the fact that we need to perform work to combat it. However, that shouldn’t stop us from fighting it with all we have. Entropy, an important physics concept, is an idea that a system will eventually become more disordered and chaotic over time. But that doesn’t stop you tidying up once in a while does it? Just how we need to fight against chaos and disorder, so we need to fight unfairness and inequality. It is never enough to simply say that life isn’t fair – we need to know why, and ask ourselves if we should combat this. And I’m certain that we can fight it – and maybe even destroy it. Perhaps I’m a hopeless idealist, some sort of crazy liberal fool who believes that a country without gun rights can have a working democracy. But I’d like to think that it’s an ideal that’s worth working towards. Who knows? Maybe in a hundred years’ time, history teachers will be able to point at this date, and say that this is the year that the revolution for equality started.

Opining on Opinions

Image by AMERICAN ARTIST BEN MURPHY via Flickr

Where, most dearly beloved reader, did you get your opinions from? Did you learn them at your mother’s knee? Were they beaten into you at school? Did you gain them from reading popular science books? Friends, family, religion, political leaders, harsh realities of life? How, reader, did you, in effect, come to be the person that you are?

I realise this is a bit deep, and in some respects it is just easier to have a go at making politically themed foodstuffs, but this, I think, is an important idea to think about. How much of us comes as a result of how we were raised? Are we really individuals at all, or just products of a jumbled mix of circumstance and chance?

I’m going to have to talk about my own circumstance now, mainly because I don’t know enough about you, although if you’ll e-mail me your bank details, and anything else that I might need to steal your identity, I’d gladly have a go about talking about your gullibility.

I was born in a fairly middle class, white, Christian family. Of all of those traits I haven’t dropped a single one, although a third of that is genetics, and another third is due to the fact that it’s hard to get a peerage when you’re seventeen and living in Birmingham. However, there are many things I do retain. For example, aside from my religion, I also feel strongly about education (my mother, my grandmother), I love Physics (my father), I’m pro-monarchy (father), get het up about class easily (mother) and I dislike txts w/o vwls & withhhh extraaaa lettttttterssss. That last one is most definitely my father.

I do, however, have my differences with my parents. For example, my mother would shoot me if she realised that I am not entirely persuaded that grammar schools are wrong, and my dad is more into actual engineering that the more abstract theoretical science that intrigues me. And I certainly don’t approve of many of their television choices, although that’s probably a generational thing. So I can’t really say I’m a clone of my parents.

The other major influences come from, supposedly, your social groups. I don’t drink much alcohol, although this is more to do with the fact that I only drink water because I dislike the taste of other drinks than the fact that I disapprove of the idea of getting wasted. I have a rather liberal attitude to the LGBT movement than perhaps others, and if one looked objectively at my opinions on personal freedoms, one would probably find me pushing towards Anonymous than my parents.

So who am I? In some ways, the fact that I have mixed and matched differing viewpoints hints at the way we become individuals. Taking, be it subjectively or objectively, the ideas we see around us and choosing the ones that make sense to us is how we decide who we are and what our opinions are. I’m not just a random fusion of my parents, friends, what I see one television, and the music I listen to. I’m the best of all of those ideas.

But then surely, if we all became the best of all our influences, we’d all realise that Biffy Clyro is a great band, Christianity is always right, and the poor should be given all our hard-earned money? After all, we live in a global society, where information can be shared in the blink of an eye. (Remember though, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, which is why most of what you read on the internet is nonsense.) We can’t all be taking the best of what we see, otherwise life would be perfect, and, even accounting for a nature we can’t take care of, life is nothing like perfect.

Part of this probably comes from the fact that we cannot sift through all the information at once. Taking a very small example, the Bible Belt doesn’t get out too much, and so I can imagine it’s quite hard to accidentally overhear radically liberal views over there, such as the idea that climate change isn’t a non-existing myth created by God to punish gays. However, you can’t blame everything on that.

We have to decide what is right and what is the best opinion to have. We have to somehow have an opinion on which opinion is the best opinion. If you’ll forgive the fact that opinions are now spewing out all over this paragraph like a drunk spewing on the pavement outside the pub. Ultimately, our opinion on the best opinion must be a subjective opinion, because it is made up of the opinions we already have. Our current belief systems lead us to decide which opinions we are going to accept as better than ours. Better itself is subjective.

So how do we decide to be objective? Even cold hard facts can be twisted in all sorts of ways. There is a book somewhere called ‘How to lie with statistics‘, and it is a great guide to how you can make almost any statistic suit your needs by changing it to match other statistics. Additionally, there are some things we can’t measure. This cure may cost millions of pounds, and be effectively equivalent to giving these hundred people equally important cures for a fraction of the price, but who wants to be the person to tell the sufferer that he is being neglected in favour of the greater good?

But we can start somewhere. From an early age, we need to be presented with all sorts of reading materials. If that means that Ayn Rand is handed out at GCSE age, so be it. The Guardian and the Daily Mail should be held up side-by-side so that people can make informed opinions. People need to be taught how to discriminate between fact and absolute nonsense. Science can play a very big role in this. Science is itself an area where the truth is objective, yet it requires interpretations to become usable. Teaching science in some ways becomes less important than teaching how to do science. What is research? If I publish that I’ve found correlation between wearing stupid clothes and my potential dislike for you, does that mean my opinions are affected by stupid clothes? Of course not. My dislike for you will affect my judgement of your clothes.

Well I should stop now. It’s getting too deep for me, and I am fairly sure that I don’t dislike any of you, unless you are Ayn Rand, in which case I think your policies promote a despicable lack of important personal empathy, and I hate your clothes. To conclude, we cannot say that our views are anything less than subjective borrowed opinions. We can borrow other opinions, although the decisions here will always be subjective. However, by continuing to educate ourselves about opinions that we’ve never seen before, we may hopefully come to realise some sort of truth.

Physics Isn’t Working…

A Neutrino in a Bubble Chamber - The subatomic equivalent of a jacuzzi...

Physicists across the world are aghast. Not content with blowing up a fuss the first time round, the physicists at the OPERA collaboration in Switzerland have had the indecency to repeat their results using a more accurate method, and have stumbled on a potentially profound, but nonetheless fairly irritating discovery. They are fairly sure now that physics isn’t working.

To summarise, because physics tends to be small-town news, the OPERA collaboration have fired neutrinos at a detector and, despite using extremely sensitive equipment, checking their calculations carefully, and praying to all the gods they have ever known, the team have, for the second time, found that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. Truly, they are quaking in their boots.

It is very easy to imagine that physicists are heroes among men, warriors for a valiant truth, who will strike out against fallacies and untruths. However, physicists tend to be rather conformist. It’s not nice to be working on a minor theoretical aspect to the conductivity of superfluids in zero-gravity ionic-array structural solvents, only to find that one of the modelling assumptions you’ve made turns out to be wrong. Plus there’s a bit of hero-worship going on. Einstein was quite a cool physicist, and, let’s face it, how many times have you looked at Stephen Hawking and thought ‘wow, he’s totally rad man’?

Indeed, after a long and arduous freedom of information request, and five minutes of extremely quick easy phone-hacking, I can now produce a transcript of the initial meeting where the OPERA collaboration team realised that, for the second time, something was going wrong…

“So, ah guys, we got the results, and, well, I’m sorry to say that we’ve done it again.”

“What, our neutrinos went faster than light? I thought we had rigged the experiment so that they couldn’t do that. It was embarrassing last time…”

“Yeah, clearly it didn’t work. The fundamental laws of the universe are clearly having an off day. Does anyone know if something weird has happened? I dunno, a temporal instability, or the Merkel and Sarkozy agreeing on something? I wonder if something has triggered the collapse of the universe?”

“You know, why don’t we just pack the whole thing in? Blame it on a dud satellite and campaign for an improvement to the GPS service.”

“I invented a new form of mind-wiping machine the other day, we could try using that. And if you want to get your memories back, you just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

“Neutrons don’t have a polarity.”

“They don’t? Bother. I’ve just discovered a new impossible thing.”

“What was the point of this whole experiment anyway?”

“You know, I’m not actually sure. I was just trying to see if I could aim for Berlesconi’s head.”

“Well I was trying to destroy the pope.”

“Wait a second, who are you?”

“I’m, ah, Richard Dawkins.”

“But you’re a biologist!”

“I am? Ah, sorry, probably the wrong room. Never mind…”

“Who actually published the results? We should have kept things a but quieter. Apparently physics has even been mentioned on Radio Four! Physics? On the BBC? I thought they dealt more with the social things. Why people congregate around the water cooler, and all that.”

“Oh, sorry, that was me. I had an intern in, and I clearly didn’t explain to them about the whole impossible thing, so they went ahead and published.”

“Ah well, nothing we can do, really. Just got to grin and bear it. Does anyone want a cup of stone cold tea in a mug that they haven’t washed since the early 90′s? Good, I’ll go and get some then.”

As the physicists file dejectedly out of the room, the only positive thing in their lives being ionised nuclei, a solitary figure, half shrouded in think, velvety shadows sits. A white cat rests in a box on his lap, in a state of perpetual uncertainty. The person smiles, and his teeth glint slightly in the dim light.

“Excellent,” He says, his accent a combination of old Soviet Union and German Nazi. “Everything is going to plan…”

Eurozone Stew

What all the fuss has been about.

So the Eurozone is in chaos. You’ve probably noticed this already, as, and we do apologise, this news supposedly has far-reaching consequences. One behalf of the many EU members, I am deeply sorry. We never realised that taking the currencies of some of the world’s leading economic powers and combining them with neighbouring, far less strong currencies, would ever have anything like global policies. We thought it would just be like, you know, how Celebrations chocolates are collectively so popular. We forgot the fact that Milky Ways and Bounties always end up left behind.

But yes, the Eurozone is in chaos, and it’s times like this that our good friend Robert Peston turns round, faces the camera squarely and brings out his trump card: the cooking metaphor. Clearly, he is a man who is not ashamed of his more effeminate pleasures, and he is certainly a member of the modern age that rightly understands that there is more to cooking than leaving it to women, and let me just say that I thoroughly support this viewpoint.

However, it can also be said that some metaphores can be taken a little too far. To that end, I present Eurozone Stroganoff, which serves most first world countries, including, suprisingly

Heat Greece in a frying pan until warm, then fry eurozone political leaders until sweating, while continually stirring with your continued absence of any serious financial suggestions. Yes, Occupy, I’m talking about you.

Gradually add Italy, Ireland, and other meats to taste. You may wish to do this in two batches, this will be fine, and will also leave plenty of room in the pan for anything else to fall into accidentally. Whoops, there goes France.

When everything is nicely browned, sprinkle IMF bailouts and political summits to taste. (Remember, not too many, each meeting that happens increases the chance of one of your ingredients accidentally being overheard complaining about the Israelis.)

Add neighbouring EU-but-not-Eurozone national leaders and representatives.. Make sure you heat Cameron up carefully. Remember to combine flavours perfectle – Cameron doesn’t necessarily go with Clegg in the same way that a bit of Fox brings out the Werrity perfectly.

Stir well.

Add stock. You should have already made stock, but, since this recipe is almost certainly a rushed job causing many late nights (how long is it taking you to cook a stroganoff?) you won’t have got round to doing so. In this situation, you should grab the bare bones of a well-roasted Berlesconi (try to get a whole one: there’s lots of meat on that) and add lots a bare flesh, preferably out of a Berlesconi cabinet, which is always kept well stocked with some really enticing stuff. Stew the whole thing for a few years, add plenty of confidence votes, police enquiries and international disaproval, and then drain off the liquid. This is known as bunga-bunga stock.

Anyway, add that, and cover the pan. Simmer for about 30 minutes, or longer if people are asking difficult questions outside and you don’t want to face them. Add a good dollop of a slightly sour yet nice and fresh age old rivalry. Germany? Two world wars and one world cup. And we had to rescue the French twice. Never mind the fact that they are both world powers and the UK is unable to control basic things like how to keep confidential documents confidential (hint, don’t dump them in the park) and doesn’t know who controls border control. (Theresa knows more than she’s letting in, sorry on…)

In the meantime, cook up some genuine Chinese bailout money to add to the mixture, and then keep it extremely far away from your Eurozone Stroganoff. Preferably on the other side of the world.

Apparently stroganoff is a very retro 70s style dish to serve up. I hope I’ve dragged it into the current decade with this variation, although I suspect it will keep well until at least 2020, when you should probably realise that it’s time to dispose of the single currency. Yes, it’s easier when you want to visit neighbouring countries, but I’m not entirely sure that basing your entire currency on reducing the headache of a handful of tourists from just down the road is the wisest course of action.

Enjoy!