Dave Cockayne’s personal blog

I’m really starting to despair at the quality of BBC programming these days, and today’s Horizon is no exception. An appallingly one sided view of GM crops that paints all scientists as being of the same opinion (GM is wonderful and harmless and will save the world’s poor) and the only voice of dissent comes from violent eco-protesters.

Near the start of the programme they show a time lapse clip of a field 50% GM and 50% non GM. Then herbicides are applied and the non GM crops wither and die while the GM crops are unaffected by the massive dose of herbicide.

Jimmy Doherty then claims a few seconds later that ‘GM crops are good for the environment because farmers use less pesticide and herbicide’.

Hang on a minute…

If the plant has been deliberately genetically modified to be highly resistant to a herbicide it is so that more herbicide, not less, can be applied to it. This is a highly contentious issue that keeps getting debunked. In 2002 the BBC’s own Newsnight looked at GM farming in America and found that not only were more herbicides and pesticides being used on GM crops, but the weeds were starting to cross pollinate and, more worryingly, develop herbicide resistance as the genes in the GM crops ‘jumped’ into the weeds.

The programme also fails to mention the fact that Monsanto, the company that makes the GM crops mentioned, also sells the herbicides and maintains that GM is perfectly safe, have a less then favourable past. They have repeatedly lied about the safety of their products and used all manner of tactics to suppress evidence.

Given that good science maintains a control group to compare effects with, there is no way for us to detect long term effects of GM because of the rapid worldwide adoption and the invasive nature of plants, GM crops have already contaminated and crossed with natural strains over a distance of hundreds of miles. There is no proper control group where we can easily identify trends in health or patterns of illness as even people that eat only organic produce are still consuming significant amounts of GM food.

The bleeding heart tour of Africa is also a shocking thing to do. Rhodesia managed just fine growing non GM crops until Mugabe took over and gave all the farms to his cronies. All of Africa’s food problems could be solved with good governance and an agreement with the US & Europe to stop destroying it’s local markets by dumping massively subsidised grain on the continent.

A little out of date now, but an excellent book on the subject is GE and You by Moyra Bremner. Much, much better than the piece of garbage the BBC has just aired that is as balanced as a Monsanto press statement.

Tags: Genetic, Engineering, Genetically, Modified, Food, Soya, Crops, GM, Monsanto

Filed by dave at 6:00 am under Uncategorized
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A video from google tech talks about some really good educational uses of lego mindstorms and also the scratch environment.

Filed by dave at 12:26 pm under Pedagogy, Technology, web video
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How to Break Web Software is a great (if a little old) google tech talk by Mike Andrews about web security with a good demo of some exploits and tools. If you are writing web based software it is certainly worth the 90 minutes. The exploits shown are all to common and the tools and techniques shown are again useful for testing your own scripts.

Filed by dave at 2:33 pm under web video
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Another excellent talk from TED, I think the best snippet of the talk comes quite early on, about 3 minutes in, when she talks about the evolutionary algorithm and quote Dan Dennet.

If you have

• Variation
• Selection
• Heredity

You MUST get evolution.Dennet sums this up nicely with

“Design out of Chaos Without the Aid of Mind”

Unfortunately after a great start the rest of the talk seems very rushed and speculative, ideas are not introduced and explored properly as if she has taken a 3 hour lecture and culled it down to 20 minutes without dropping any concepts.

Worth the 20 minutes even so

Filed by dave at 12:22 pm under web video
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While the inclusion of video on the web maybe infamous for happy slapping on youtube and annoying for all those new style adverts, you can occasionally find some really great lectures and talks.

This one is by Vint Cerf, who played a huge role in the creation and development of the modern internet. For instance it is well known that IPv4 address space is running out (hence the move to IPv6).

But when was the last time you heard someone say “I have to admit I am personally the cause of this problem”. It turns out Vint was heading the program in 1977 and an argument had been raging for about a year between his engineers, he made the decision to go ahead with 32 bit addressing for the experimental IPv4 thinking they could re-engineer later for a production system.

He starts his talk on the topic of writing some of the first protocols for what would become arpanet and ends it talking about protocols he has been developing with NASA for an interplanetary internet.

Highly recommend if you have 80 minutes to spare!

Filed by dave at 7:59 am under Technology
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With the recent release of the IPCC’s final report, there has been a lot of doom and gloom about the environment so I started reading up on ‘renewable energy’ and learned a few surprising things.

There is usually a lot of press about individual people needing to do more for the environment and cut energy usage but it seems that the amount of energy we are using isn’t unsustainable, just how we generate that energy.

The world currently uses a tiny amount compared to the potential of renewable resources at our disposal with current technology.

A study done by Stanford University, shows a wind map of the globe. They estimate that exploitable wind sites round the globe could produce 72 Terrawatts of electricity if we only use the premium sites available to us. To put that in perspective, as a planet we currently consume less than 2 Terrawatts per year of electricity.

So wind is looking good so far, but there is also that big burning ball in the heavens that puts out a lot of energy. Solar power brings to mind those ’screw to your roof’ black photovoltaic panels but there is another way of utilising solar radiation, called Concentrated Solar Power, or CSP for short. (More info on CSP here)

CSP is very simple, it uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays and turn water into steam. The steam is then used to drive turbines and generate electricity. CSP plants can provide power at roughly two thirds the cost of building a nuclear power plant to generate the same amount of power.

CSP also has a couple of other advantages over other forms of power generation, it is safe, simple and cheap to maintain. you don’t need to worry about a bit of hot water going critical and killing lots of the population. (If you think nuclear power is all nice and safe, clean and good for us then look here for a list of civilian nuclear accidents and here for a list of military nuclear accidents. Changed your mind yet?)

The second advantage (as if being cheap and won’t kill anyone wasn’t enough) is that CSP plants can also be used to purify and desalinate water as a side effect, given that the world is apparently going to be facing a water crisis in a few decades time, this is quite handy.

CSP plants placed in the world’s hot desert areas could provide 200 times more energy than the world currently uses.

There is plenty of potential energy available for us to harness, it’s not a problem of scientific advancement or over consumption. It’s a problem of political will. There is no energy crisis or any inevitability for the impending dire apocalypse, we just need our governments to manage our energy policies sensibly.

Us using energy saving light bulbs, insulating our houses and recycling our rubbish counts for nothing if carbon is still coming out of the power stations that supply our energy.

Filed by dave at 7:58 pm under Uncategorized
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I’ve been reading or reading a lot of Richard Dawkins recently and also watching some programs about what happened in Dover. (I love the pastafarian movement that arose as a result of what happened)

Something struck me, especially when watching Ken Miller talking about Michael Behe’s ‘irreducible complexity‘. I think the idea of irreducible complexity is a non starter as an argument if you watch Ken Miller’s lecture he destroys the argument pretty solidly. As a programmer/designer however, I can see a remarkable beauty in the way genes work. It is common for programmers to create libraries of code, modules, components and objects that do a specific task. These blocks of code can be reused, doing the same task in different projects, often many ready made chunks of code are bought together to play a part in a project that accomplishes a completely different task than the one the code was initially designed for.

Ken Miller demonstrates exactly the same idea happening at a genetic level, the dna behind one portion of the bacterial flagellum is exactly the same piece of code, that when used in isolation is a ‘type 3 syringe’ used for injecting dna into cells. Same code, completely different outcome.

Programmers (who are without doubt, intelligent designers) long ago adopted the practice and any computer science graduate will be familiar with the concept of writing reusable code. It seems that programmers hit upon a highly efficient and successful method for development that is far more efficient in the long run than having to write new code from scratch in every new project.

The similarities between the practices of programmers and the elegant workings of life at a genetic level may be a pure coincidence, or it may be the telltale finger print of intelligent design.

There is a testable way to tell and I think that if discovered it could disprove, or a least cast serious doubt on the theory of evolution.

Evolution relies on the ideas of ‘descent with modification’ and diversification of species.

Descent with modification basically says that you inherit your dna from your parents. Sometimes there will be a copy error or mutation and you as an individual will have a new and unique piece of code. If that code change gives you a survival advantage there is a good chance that you will do well, have children who will also do well and the new code starts to spread through a population.

Diversification of species says that when two populations are split and continue to evolve separately, after time they may no longer be able to interbreed and they will eventually become two separate species with a common ancestor.

So why might these ideas spell doom for evolution?

Because of the glowing bunnies.

We know that it is technically possible for an intelligent designer (in this case a french geneticist) to take a gene that produces a certain protein from one species and drop it into a completely different species and the gene may carry on producing the same protein. In this example a gene for flouresence is taken out of a jellyfish and injected into a rabbit embryo. The result is the gene creates the same protein in the rabbit that it did in the jellyfish and the end result is a ‘glow in the dark bunny’.

This experiment breaks across wide species boundaries and also breaks descent with modification, it would be impossible for evolution to do this but relatively easy for an intelligent designer.

If it can be shown that two widely separate species like a jellyfish and rabbit or a cow and a cabbage etc have identical, highly complex gene sequences that were not in a common ancestor then evolution is in trouble. For that to happen it requires an outside influence meddling with an organism’s genes as I would imagine it is statistically almost impossible for identical, highly complex sequences to evolve by chance repeatedly.

A few footnotes:

I’m no geneticist/evolutionary scientist and this is all speculation. It may also make absurd assumptions and be completely wrong, that’s what you get for not treating bloggers with a big dose of scepticism!

I don’t believe in intelligent design and I do believe in evolution.

Bacteria don’t count, horizontal gene transfer is well known in bacteria and even the ability to absorb foreign genes from the surrounding environment.

Filed by dave at 11:47 pm under Uncategorized
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I bought a canon 400d a while ago to start playing with photography and flickr. At the end of my holiday in Budapest, I managed to snap this shot from the hotel room of an approaching thunder storm. I just wish all my photos looked as good!

You can click on the photo for a larger view.

Filed by dave at 6:48 pm under Photography
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A good read if you are interested in online learning, and handily it’s an open-source, online book
Theory and Practice of Online Learning

powered by performancing firefox

Filed by dave at 11:47 am under Uncategorized
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If you are viewing the source of a web page to debug output while writing server scripts, pressing F5 in the view source window reloads the page content. This is helpful as you don’t have to close the source window, refresh the browser window and view the source again to get an updated view when you change your php script.

Filed by dave at 10:47 am under Firefox
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