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

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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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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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Just been trying to figure why my previously working copy of performancing was refusing to login to this blog but working fine for others.

Even after updating wordpress, trying a clean install of the scripts creating new users, checking permissions, manually checking the DB to ensure hashes were being written properly etc etc, no joy

the users accounts could login as normal through wordpress but not remotely using xmlrpc.php.

It would appear that my webhost must have disallowed access to xmlrpc.php  to thwart malicious scripts attempting to scan for vulnerable installations.

As soon as I renamed xmlrpc.php to somethingelse.php it started working splendidly again. An email would have been nice and saved me a couple of hours of head scratching…

Filed by dave at 2:38 pm under Uncategorized
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I’ve had this blog for a few months now and I don’t really know what to do with it. I started a blog because the college I work at was considering providing blogs for students, well a senior member of staff heard about blogs been the next big thing “so why don’t we have one?”.

I didn’t know what to put on a blog at the time and was dubious about their contribution to a student’s learning. I decided to see what happened when I used a blog for no particular reason and months later the answer is not very much. A few posts about nothing in particular, not connected, related, of any educational value or of any interest to any one including myself. A few passing thoughts recorded for no great reason other than thinking ‘I really should blog something’.

I feel no great desire to publish my thoughts to the world, many blogs I’ve looked at seem to be inane drivel pouring from persons thought processes onto the web (like this is). Other blogs are for corporate projects, hobbies, political coolness, rants and neurotic outlets. A seemingly huge span of human culture centred around a person or project.

I am also a little worried about the future consequences of providing blogs to students, even if a student deletes a post there is no guarantee that it doesn’t still exist in a cache or archive, the internet archive has a 2 petabyte collection of old sites from the last ten years. People are already very aware of how easy it is to use caches to dig up deleted material as can be seen in this blog entry about why people blog:

Speaking of hot, and why not? Here’s Gillian Gunson: My simple answer: I’m a passive-aggressive attention whore.After visiting Gill’s blog “gillianic tendencies” it doesn’t seem that simple. (The researchers among us can find her earlier postings in Google cache. Thank you Google.)

What happens when students go on to apply for responsible jobs?

No point denying it when the third link on the google results page for a search of your name points to the archived version of your 10 year old uni blog post where you wrote about waking up with a hangover having slept with someone you shouldn’t have after taking too many drugs the night before. Interviewers will tend to strike you off the list for running their new particle accelerator…

A good even if extreme example of the consequences of even an anonymous blog is the girl with a one track mind A 30 something woman starts an anonymous blog in 2004 writing very explicitly and intimately about her sex life, she gets a readership of several hundred thousand and the offer of a book deal which she accepts. The same week the book is published in 2006 a national newspaper revealed her true identity to the world. She looses her job and career and has to come to terms with the fact that her family, friends and everyone she has ever slept with now know about it.

If blogs are personal and intimate does education have any place encouraging students to publish in this fashion by providing the service?

If blogs in education are provided as a less intimate learning log, personal learning journey or reflective journal surely this is best done within the confines of an institutional learning environment rather than out in the wild web?

Looking at warwick blogs there seems to be little difference between the subject of posts to blogs and the subjects you would see by collecting a persons posts to different forums. It’s just organised in a more egotistical fashion.

A pattern I have noticed in comparing blogs, forums and comments is that many blog owners put a lot more effort into the construction of their work than if they were starting a thread on forum or posting a comment. The subject (and even the quality/value sometimes) may not change greatly but the effort put into it and the quantity seems to be consistently higher. Anybody know if there is any proper research available on blog posting?

I have noticed this in the few posts that I have made on this blog I seem to put more thought and care into a blog posting than I would normally put into a forum post or even many emails.

Instead of letting it die I’ll see if defining a set purpose for blogging will motivate me to post more.

I’ve decided to use this blog to form passing abstract thoughts into something more coherent and lasting and reassess my use of it in a few months time. The only audience I’m targeting is myself, I could of course simply use a diary but that wouldn’t be blogging would it? A fairly vague raison d-etre but good enough for now

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“I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel.” Bush — Washington, D.C., May 4, 2006

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Get ready for the Vista/SUSE smackdown!

“As unbelievable as it might seem, OpenSUSE actually seems to support more hardware than Vista does at this stage in its development. Linux having more hardware support than Windows — who says we don’t live in a time of miracles?!”

Hmmm suse is very good and getting better all the time. Will be interesting to see if microsoft can pull off a good operating system in 6 months considering the number of features they have dropped.

Filed by dave at 8:30 pm under Uncategorized
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Link to movie

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