The Inappropriateness of Dr Sam Chew

42 - Well, well, well...

2011-04-16T23:45:00.000+01:00

So, it used to be February 2010, now it's April 2011. Over a year since my last blog post, and in that time a fair amount has changed. We have a new Prime Minister in the form of David Cameron, who you may remember I called a "tosser" back in January. I still stick to that, but mainly because he's currently in the process of fucking up the country and most of its treasured institutions, rather than just playing politics with the sexual assault of two pre-adolescent boys.

The Lib Dems are also in Government - who would have guessed that?! - as part of a coalition with the Tories. Yes, David Cameron, despite running against the most unpopular Prime Minister since, well, John Major, and flying high in the polls for about two years, somehow managed not to get an overall majority. And so to Nick Clegg he ran, whose arms (if not his legs) were wide open and waiting for the inevitable embrace. And so the Lib Dems are gallantly aiding the Tories in screwing up the nation, merrily taking a gamble (in Nick's own words) with our economy. So, bang goes higher education, lower education, an NHS which actually works properly, all the money for our armed forces, the transport systems, etc. etc. I voted Lib Dem, ostensibly to keep the Tories out in my constituency which is Lib Dem. Fat lot of good that did. Still, at least there's going to be a vote on AV which isn't quite proportional representation but is better than FPTP. The vote will probably be lost, as most of the newspapers have got their tongues firmly lodged inside Cameron's rectum, but at least a vote will be had. Should've happened about 10 years ago, mind, but then Labour rather messed that one up, didn't they? Wouldn't have even needed a referendum. I don't really fully dislike the Lib Dems all that much, but they are ultimately allowing the Tories to wreak the kind of destruction that made them spunk in their trousers sixteen years ago.

Labour have a new leader, in the form of Ed Miliband - a man who nobody expected to head up the party. He seems alright to me, though time will tell, but out of all the candidates I think he's the one that impressed me the most. I reckon he's got the ability to make the Labour party one that I feel I can vote for again. And if he's got any nous he'll do away with all the anti-civil liberties gobshite that New Labour
decided was so important. At the moment, however, they're still growing their teeth. And whilst it's fairly easy to be in opposition when you've got such an immediately unpopular government, they have been fairly anonymous thus far. Perhaps that's for the best, though.

But, ignoring the imminent and ruthless destruction of our country, most importantly: I've finished my PhD! Woop! Its completion was a very long, drawn out process, as I'm sure many of those who have done one are all too aware: the simulations were finished, after a very long, drawn out three months in the Autumn of 2009, at the start of December. The writing-up took place during that period, with my wife playing school mistress and demanding chapters were written by certain deadlines. It helped, too: by the end of December I had submitted my final chapters to my supervisors and had a full draft thesis. Then the fun began.

The first stage, after the Christmas holidays ended, was to get some soft-bound theses printed so they could be sent off for examination. This was rather tricky as they were being printed in Loughborough and I live about 135 miles from there. As it was, my supervisor managed to get across to the printing place to OK the first print (they wouldn't go ahead unless it was OK'd), and things progressed well. Forms were filled in, theses were submitted, examiners were found, and three months later in April 2010, a viva happened. I passed. This was good. Celebrations occurred. Required alterations were sent out, alterations were made, final copy was signed off, printing of final copies was scheduled.

Then, more interesting stuff happened. The intended graduation date was in July 2010 and in order to be able to graduate at that time, I needed to submit about a month before, in mid-June. I hurried along the corrections that I needed to make, and then email them off to the printing place in mid-May, giving me a month. Turned out that the pdf I'd created had errors in the contents table (grrr Microsoft) and so the first print was, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks. However, I did not discover this for a while as my supervisor was very very busy and unable to get down to the printing place for ages after I'd sent it and they'd printed it. Time ticked by. She finally got down there to check it, and discovered the contents error. Arseholes. Redid it, sent it back up, made sure it worked this time, and then tried to get her to check it again. She was still very busy and couldn't commit to doing it. Thankfully, I'd changed jobs back in February and was regularly going up to Nottingham University. I made an excuse to drop in on Loughborough on the way back (they're on the same train line) and check the second first print myself. This time, there were no problems and the whole set of printing and hard-binding could complete. Time was still ticking by, and so by the time I was able to finally go up to Loughborough to pay for and fully submit the final, sexy, hard-bound theses, it was about two days before the deadline. Argh.

Note, though, that the deadline was, like the vitality of Schrödinger's cat, somewhat nebulous and uncertain. It could have been one of several dates, depending on who you spoke to at the University. I took the earliest one, naturally, and worked to that. I managed to blag a day off work to go up to Loughborough to pay for and submit my theses. This had required some painstaking effort - checking that my supervisor would be in to sign the relevant forms, that I had all the other forms I needed and that the Research Student Office was open to receive them. All was in alignment and so off I trotted in my car to the University.

Now then, it is an important point to note that the day before I was due to go up for the big submission, I had made the fatal mistake of trying to use my card to get some money out of a cash machine. The Barclays cash point in the western end of Euston station, just outside Paul, is the psychotic fucker which gleefully took my card off me, then refused to give me either cash or card back. So, I ring up Barclays and get that card cancelled. Not my personal account card, no no, checked that with the phone person. Not personal account, but joint account. Definitely joint account card, yes? Yes. Good. Not personal account card. Need personal account card for paying for theses. Joint account card swallowed. Cancel joint account. Not personal account. Need personal account card. But that's ok, because the joint account card had been cancelled, and not the personal account card.

One day later, the beautiful hot June summer sun saw a very sweaty and flustered Sam swearing really rather profusely in front of a bemused and possibly quite frightened printing service assistant as his personal account card wouldn't work properly, because it had been cancelled. My life was slowly melting before my eyes: if I couldn't pay for the theses, I couldn't submit that day, would be unlikely to get more time off the next day to go back up with a different card, to pay for them and try to submit, and even if I did, there was no saying that my supervisor would be around to sign them off, the deadline would be missed, and I'd have to graduate in December instead.

Luckily, however, for reasons I won't go into, I had my wife's credit card on me. A quick and panicky phone call later saw her give my the PIN and the theses were paid for. They got signed and submitted and a happy Sam graduated that July.

41 - Multiples of (B-1) where B is the number base being used always ultimately sum to (B-1) when summed in the number base B

2010-02-01T13:09:00.002Z

After I finally got to the end of my seemingly interminable series of posts on my PhD, I thought I'd follow it up straight away with something, in the same sort of way that one might eat a chocolate straight after swallowing back down some vomit. However, I didn't actually post this at the time, but thankfully it's about maths. Well, numbers, really, and how they work, and so it's fairly timeless.

I like numbers. This is apparent to anyone who knows me well. One of my favourite numbers is the number 9. 9 is a good number, and it has lots of properties which make it lovely. For instance, any multiple of nine has digits which sum to a multiple of nine. Take the number, 27602742108312 has digits which add up to 45, whose digits add up to 9, therefore 27602742108312 is a multiple of 9.

Some years ago, this property intrigued me. I was on a train and fairly bored, so I had a think about it. Why is this true?

If one writes a list of the multiples of 9, you get the following:

9
18
27
36
45
54
63
72
81
...

Remember your primary school maths lessons? Remember how, when you were being taught about long addition, they spoke about "units, tens, hundreds, thousands"? Well, this is being used here. Every time you add nine to the previous number, if the unit is greater than 0, it is reduced by 1, while 1 is added to the tens. Thus, the numbers balance out, and the sum remains at 9.

But it's not quite that simple. The reason why we count in units, tens, hundreds, and so on is because we use the decimal number system. That is, we count in base 10. It's possible to count in other bases - if you've ever used a tally counting system, that's using base 1. If you understand binary, that's base 2. Hexadecimal is base 16, and so on. Whatever base you're in (let's call it B), the digits in the numbers you use are arranged in a very specific format:

... B⁵ B⁴ B³ B² B¹ B⁰

So, in base 10, we count in:

... 10⁵ 10⁴ 10³ 10² 10¹ 10⁰

Which works out as:

... 100000 10000 1000 100 10 1

So, if you want to represent the number "35673" in decimal, you're saying you have three ten thousands, five thousands, six hundreds, seven tens and three units. If you are counting in binary, these numbers are:

... 32 16 8 4 2 1

So, if you have the binary number "101101", you're saying you have one thirty-two, no sixteens, one eight, one four, no twos and one one, which is the same as 45 in decimal.

If you are counting in ternary (base 3), your columns are:

...243 81 27 9 3 1

And thus the number "201212" represents two times 243, no eighty-ones, one twenty-seven, two nines, one three and two ones. 486+0+27+18+3+2=536 in decimal.

Whenever we count on our hands, we use each finger to represent a one - we are counting in base 1. However, if we count in base two on our hands, we can get a much larger range of numbers:

Hold your hands in front of you, palms facing you. Put down all your fingers into fists. Imagine that this represents zero. Whenever you raise a finger, that puts a '1' into the number that that finger represents, while a finger being down represents a '0'. (Note that this assumes complete independence of finger movement, which isn't quite true for the ring and little fingers, but it is good enough for a demonstration). Raise your right-hand thumb. This number is therefore 0000000001 in binary, or 1 in decimal. Put your thumb down, and raise your right index finger. This is 0000000010, or 2 in decimal. Raise your thumb again. This is 0000000011, or 3 in decimal. Put both these down and raise your middle finger. Apologise to whoever is now looking at you in a very offended way, and tell them that this is 0000000100, or 4 in decimal. If you keep counting in this way, by the time you get to raise the thumb on your left hand, you've counted all the way up to 512. Raise all your fingers, and this represents 1023. On two hands which you previously thought could only count up to ten.

But all this is a minor distraction. Hopefully, you're now familiar with number bases. Let's say that we have a number base A, where A merely represents any number. If A is 2, we are counting in binary. If A is 10, we are in decimal, and so on. If we take the number A-1, any multiple of A-1 will have digits which sum to A-1. To show this, in senary (number base 6), we count as follows, with senary on the left hand and decimal on the right:

0 - 0
1 - 1
2 - 2
3 - 3
4 - 4
5 - 5
10 - 6
11 - 7
12 - 8
13 - 9
14 - 10
15 - 11
20 - 12
21 - 13
22 - 14
23 - 15
24 - 16
25 - 17
30 - 18
31 - 19
32 - 20
33 - 21
34 - 22
35 - 23
40 - 24
41 - 25
42 - 26
...

We are counting in base 6, and so I am saying that any multiple of five (6-1, for those not keeping up) will have digits which sum to a multiple of 5. I have highlighted these in bold above. The multiples of 5 in senary are 5, 14, 23, 32, 41, 50, 55, 104, 113, 122, 131, 140, 145, and so on. Each of the sums of these numbers adds to a multiple of five. However, look at that last number: 145. The numbers add up to 10, which is clearly 5 x 2, but these digits don't add up to 5. However, we need to add the numbers in senary, not decimal: 1 + 4 + 5 equals 14 in senary, and these digits add up to 5. This property is true for all bases.

Again, in hexadecimal, the multiples of 15 (represented as F) are: F, 1E, 2D, 3C, 4B, ..., F0, FF, 10E, and so on. For the number FF, the digits in decimal add to 30, which is, again, a multiple of F. In hexadecimal, F + F = 1E, and 1 + E add to F.

I'm now going to generalise this a bit. It gets a bit technical, so bear with me.

Whenever we count in base A, we set up our columns so that, as above, we have

...A⁵ A⁴ A³ A² A 1

We set all the values to zero, and begin incrementing the units column by one. When we get to the number "A", we set the units column to zero and the "A" column to 1. Thus, any number which is smaller than A lies only within the units column. Likewise, any number which is smaller than A² lies purely within the "A" and units columns, and so on. Similarly, if a number is greater than (A-1), the number must lie in more than just the units column. This is a very important property. Using this property, a table can be constructed showing all of the digits of any multiple of any base A, and their sum:

N	N x (A-1)	A³	A²	A	1	Digit Sum
0	0	0	0	0	0	0
1	(A-1)	0	0	0	(A-1)	(A-1)
2	A+(A-1)-1	0	0	1	(A-1)-1	(A-1)
3	2A+(A-1)-2	0	0	2	(A-1)-2	(A-1)
...
(A-2)	(A-3)A+2	0	0	(A-3)	2	(A-1)
(A-1)	(A-2)A+1	0	0	(A-2)	1	(A-1)
A	(A-1)A	0	0	(A-1)	0	(A-1)
A+1	(A-1)A+(A-1)	0	0	(A-1)	(A-1)	2(A-1)
A+2	A²+(A-1)-1	0	1	0	(A-1)-1	(A-1)
A+3	A²+A+(A-1)-2	0	1	1	(A-1)-2	(A-1)
...
A²-1	(A-2)A²+(A-1)A+1	0	A-2	A-1	1	2(A-1)
A²	(A-1)A²	0	A-1	0	0	(A-1)
A²+1	(A-1)A²+(A-1)	0	(A-1)	0	(A-1)	2(A-1)
A²+2	(A-1)A²+A+(A-1)-1	0	(A-1)	1	(A-1)-1	2(A-1)
...

From this table we can see that, at least up to a certain point, all of the multiples of (A-1) have numbers which sum to a multiple of (A-1). I believe that it extrapolates to all multiples of any base. Now, recall that I, at the time, was considering all of this on a train. Rather like Fermat, I came up with a terrifically brilliant explanation for why this was so. But I didn't write it down and now I can't remember. This latter point I put down to old age. Bear in mind also, that I've forgotten much of the mathematics I used in my degree, which is something I intend to remedy at a later date.

Still, the concept is a very interesting one, and it's something that I've not come across elsewhere. If one of my _(mumble) readers wants to point me in the direction of an interesting explanation for this from someone else, please do. I've yet to find one.

40 - David Cameron: Tosser.

2010-01-22T16:12:00.005Z

So. Imagine the scene. It is September 2009, in Edlington, Yorkshire. Two boys, aged nine and eleven, head out on their bikes, with their dog, and go to the shops and then to a skateboard park. They are approached by two brothers, aged 10 and 11, who ask to use their bikes. They then ask the boys if they want to see a dead fox. The brothers grab the boys and drag them through a barbed wire fence, threatening to kill them. Their money and phone are stolen from them. Shards of glass from a broken beer bottle are held against their necks. The boys are stamped upon, have bricks and stones thrown at their heads. Pieces of a ceramic sink are dropped on the head of the older boy. A metal ring is used by the elder brother to attempt to strangle one of the boys. The victims are forced to strip and perform sex acts on each other. As people are heard approaching the areas, the two brothers pull a plastic sheet over the boys and set fire to it, giving them both burns. Part of the attack is filmed on the phone of one of the boys, in order to humiliate them. They are regularly threatened with death. An old clothes line is pulled round the nine year old's neck, while one of the brothers asks if he has died yet. After the attackers feel their arms beginning to ache, they leave to go and meet their father. The older boy tells the younger to leave him there to die (at eleven years old).

The nine year old wanders into town. He is seen by an elderly couple - the husband laughs at first because he thinks the child's red colour is a bad paint job. They quickly realise it is blood and rush out to help. The child is wearing no shoes, no socks, is wet from the waist down and covered in blood. They manage to learn from the boy that his friend is still out in the wooded ravine, close to death and blinded; his face cannot be seen through the blood. The husband rings his son, who goes out to search for him. The boy is found and the man and a policeman wait with him while an air ambulance arrives. The 40 year old man who waited is, afterwards, so distressed by the sight of the boy that he cannot speak to anyone - he just cries and cries. He still cannot walk past the scene of the horrific incident, it distresses him so much. The policeman is similarly reduced to tears by the sight, and says that in his 22 years of service, it is the most distressing thing he has had to deal with. The consultant doctor says that if the elder boy had been found much later, he would almost certainly not have survived.

The brothers are caught, found guilty of grievous bodily harm and sentenced to an indefinite detention of at least five years, with three years on the sex offenders list. They show no remorse or emotion in interview or during the trial, and claim that they did it because they were bored. A child protection expert tells the presiding judge that the younger brother is a very high risk to the community, and has the potential to become a "seriously disturbed psychopathic offender" unless his treatment was appropriate. She says he has shown hardly any empathy for his victims. News reports claim that they had access to their father's pornographic DVDs and horror films. Their home is filled with violence - their father once threatened to slash their mother's face. From nine years old on, the older brother began to smoke cannabis and drink cider. He has been expelled from school and has a habit of headbutting or hitting teachers. He has a number of convictions, and his younger brother has previously been reprimanded for assault.

This is the case of a truly gruesome and horrific attack. It is difficult to believe that something could be done to children by other children. But these sorts of attacks, while not frequent, remain in the public conscience for a long time, gaining notoriety. Think of some previous cases: Jamie Bulger, the Soham murders, Baby P, Dunblane, the Moors Murders, Fanny Adams. These cases span time and the government of that day. It is not unreasonable to think that no matter what the investment in social care, these cases would not cease - no society has yet found any solution to them. The level of pain and grief that the victims and parents have to go through is immense, so you would be forgiven for thinking that any politician seeking to make any kind of political capital from these extreme cases is acting so distastefully that it's difficult to think of any word to describe them other than "cunt".

Extreme cases do not define the social care that a country offers. They are outliers, anomalies - they cannot in any way describe the nature of the country in which they occur. There is a saying: "extreme cases make bad law", referring to attempting to legislate for something because something truly horrific has happened. Responding to this kind of event with legislation, or even policy change, is a bad idea because they lack any description of a wider problem. That's not to say that systems shouldn't be in place to attempt to prevent these kinds of abhorrent acts, but any reaction should be considered only in response to the broader issues.

Enter David Cameron, the leader of the Tories. In Gillingham today, he referred to this case as being indicative of "Broken Britain", saying it is symptomatic of wider social issues, that people must ask wider questions about social breakdown. He said,

I think when things like this happen it is right to stand back, reflect and ask ourselves some deep questions about what is going wrong in our society.

The BBC reports, "Mr Cameron denied that his frequent references to a "broken Britain" was an over-statement and "terrible crimes" such as those which had happened in Doncaster could not be ignored." He then went on to accuse Labour of covering up the report into the incident. The Treasury Minister Liam Byrne pretty much hits the nail on the head when he says,

What Mr Cameron appears to be trying to do is seizing on one absolutely horrific crime and almost tarring the people of Doncaster, if not the people of Britain, with the same kind of standards and I think that people will recoil from that.

Think about what David Cameron is saying. He's saying that because of an horrific physical and sexual assault by two children on two other children, this is symptomatic of "Broken Britain". He doesn't say it outright, but he implies that Broken Britain is Labour's fault. He claims, meanwhile, that these extreme cases are not down to any single Government, despite everything else he says implying the total opposite.

David Cameron is trying to turn this event so that it helps him become Prime Minister. He is a vile, horrible man who is feeding off the pain and suffering of two little boys and their families, in order to gain political ground.

And thus, I have no hesitation in saying that David Cameron is a tosser of the highest magnitude. The day that he gets elected as Prime Minister is the day that this country welcomes with open arms a Government which will, without doubt, manage to be even more bilious, suspicious, selfish, arrogant and useless than the present one.

39 - Petri Nets

2009-11-25T12:55:00.003Z

So here it is, Merry Christmas. I wish I could confirm that everybody is having fun, but seeing as this has been a series of blogs about various aspects of a very dull topic, I’ll be amazed if anybody is still reading it. Never mind, though, because this is the final post of this series! Woo!

Thus far, I have explained the importance of measuring various reliability characteristics for a given item. I have briefly explained how this is done, both qualitatively and quantitatively. I have given an explanation of how my work stems from this – with relevance to working out the probability of successfully completing a mission or series of missions. This final section explains how, in my PhD, all the various concepts that I need to model are modelled.

As you can imagine, it is very difficult to model factors such as bringing online a redundant system to cover the failure of a main counterpart, or the method of prediction of future component failure. In order to be able to do this, then, a tool needs to be employed which at least has the capability of modelling these. This is not really true for fault tree methods or Markov methods, for instance, due to the limitations of the models produced. Luckily, I was introduced to Petri nets.

A Petri net uses several components to represent things:

Places – these are shown graphically as circles, and are used to store values, known as tokens.
Tokens – these are the values that are stored within places. They can move around through the switching of transitions. An integer number of tokens is stored, and this number can be infinite.
Transitions – these allow tokens to be transferred, created or destroyed. They can have a time delay attached or not. They operate through a strict logical set of states.
Arcs – these connect places to transitions, and vice versa. Places only connect to transitions, and vice versa, and there can be any number of arcs between a given place and transition. If there are more than one, however, these are grouped together into one, and a weighting or multiplicity is attached to the arc, indicating its size.

Now, this may seem perfectly simple. It may seem really quite complex, but thankfully, I am here to help you see how these simple components can end up producing some very interesting things. The diagram below shows a simple Petri net shown before and after a time t. If it helps, think of t as being 10 seconds, so at the point 10 seconds, the diagram changes from the first net to the second.

The diagram, which we can call Jeff, shows a number of places (the circles), with arcs (the arrows) leading to or from a transition (the rectangle). Notice that in Jeff, some of the arcs have a weighting greater than one, shown by a small slash with a number next to it. Each of the places has tokens (the small dots) in them.

The diagram demonstrates the mechanism by which the dynamic capability of Petri nets is achieved: transition switching. A transition will usually have places which input to it (in Jeff, there are three of these), and those which take outputs from it. The switching process works as follows:

Enabling: A transition is enabled when there is a token which can travel down each arc into the transition. For instance, in Jeff, the left-hand net shows the three input places as having two, one and five tokens respectively. The arcs from these places to the transition have weightings of two, one and four respectively. Thus, the arcs have all got tokens which can travel down them, and so the transition is enabled.
Time-delay: Once the transition is enabled, a time-delay may exist which must expire. This delay can be a set value, of, say, 10 seconds, or an hour. Alternatively, it can be randomly sampled from a given distribution of times.
Switching: Once the delay, if it exists, has expired, the switching takes place. This removes the arc-number of tokens from each of the input places, and deposits an arc-number of tokens in each of the output places.

And that’s it. Beyond that, there are some more complications, such as inhibitor arcs, but that’s pretty much it.

So I have explained the mechanism by which Petri nets work, but have not really mentioned what they’re actually for. This may be a problem as my wife is always complaining that I’m useless at explaining things to the layman. But I’ll give it a go.

Consider Jeff again. It could really represent anything you want, but imagine instead that it’s a model of how to make a particular type of biscuit. You need 2 oz of flour, 1 egg and 4 oz of sugar. But you put in 2 ounces of flour, one egg, and five ounces of sugar (it’s not a healthy biscuit, and it may not work in reality) – represented in the input places. You wait a while to cook it in the oven, then afterwards you are left with four biscuits, and an ounce of sugar, because you used too much of that, and the biscuit complained at you.

As another, more relevant, example, consider the case of a component. A component works at the start of the model. It then fails at some time. After another length of time it is repaired. After some more time, it fails again, and so on. What we have here is two different states – working and failed, and two different ways of switching between them. If we have two places, one for each state, we can use a single token to represent which state the component is currently in. If we have two transitions, these can allow the switching between the states, effectively modelling the processes of “failure” and “repair”. This PN will look something like that in the diagram below, which I’ve called Albert.

In Albert, the top transition is enabled by the single token. It will wait for a certain length of time (the time it takes the component to fail) before switching, representing the component as “failed”. Once this is true, the bottom transition is enabled, which again waits for a length of time (the repair time) before switching the component back to “working” again.

This simple example is at the small end of a whole world of possibilities of modelling: using this system we can easily model the process of a mission from phase to phase. We can create Petri net representations of fault trees. We can make these fault trees cause phase failure, and thus mission and MFOP failure. We can activate or deactivate certain components, allowing for redundant systems to be modelled. And so on. The possibilities are endless. No, really, the possibilities really are endless: PNs as they are usually used in everyday life (haha) are Turing complete.

Using PNs, I have managed to create a modelling method for everything considered in my PhD: prognostic systems, sensors, a fleet of aircraft performing MFOPs which contain multiple phased missions, mission abandonment, phase insertion, redundant systems, and so on. These are all packaged together in a rather nifty computer program, which takes inputs on things such as mission data, component failure rates, phase failure logic, enabler data and so on, and creates all these lovely PNs.

What my program then does is to generate random times for component failure, and see what happens when these failures occur – do they cause phase failure? Does it put the aircraft out of action, or just abandon the mission?

If you build up enough simulations on this sort of thing, you get a very good idea of how well the overall platforms perform, and thus where the major problems are.

And that’s my PhD. It’s taken over five years, it’s made me cry and want to flagellate myself, and it’s nearly over. And when it is, you and I can laugh and drink and eat and forget all about it, pretend that it never happened (other than you having to call me “Doctor”), and get on with our lives in happy ignorance of reality.

38 - Maintenance-Free Operating Periods

2009-11-03T12:28:00.004Z

There's just two more of these posts, then you can consider yourselves educated and can talk to me about my doctorate without me having to start the conversation with the words "Right, well, you know military aircraft, yeah? They have to fly lots of missions, yeah?..."

So. You know military aircraft? They have to fly lots of missions. Missions missions missions. All day long. A mission here, a mission there, a mission everywhere. But, as we also know, things can go wrong in missions. Evil Muslim Terrorists can fire Russian Rockets from their Russian Rocket Launchers and destroy planes. Idiot Americans can accidentally Bomb Aylesbury. Wings can fall off. Luxury cars can fall out of the back of the aircraft, landing bonnet-first in a swamp where an Indian man holding a goat on a piece of string stands looking puzzled.

So, some time ago, around 1995-6, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) posited the creation of a new way of measuring the effectiveness of military aircraft, with respect to reliability. This was called a "Maintenance-Free Operating Period", or MFOP for short. The idea was that it's much more useful to the RAF to be able to send out an aircraft to complete lots of missions back-to-back, without the need for any emergency maintenance, and with a high degree of confidence that this will actually work. Once this period (called the MFOP) is finished, the platform undergoes lots of maintenance all at the same time, with parts swapped in and out, inspections made, damage repaired, and so on. This second period is called a Maintenance Recovery Period, or MRP. After that, the plane goes off again to destroy whatever Innocent Civilians has taken the Government's fancy this week.

Before 2004, when I started the PhD, the little research that existed had investigated this concept, and decided that several potential "improvements" to a platform could be made in order to reach the desired MFOPs and confidence levels. These are:

Improving the inherent reliability characteristics of the components in the platform - understand each of their typical failure distributions, parameters, causes of failure and how these can be minimised, and so on.
Put in place systems or components which usually are switched off. These can be used as a back-up to take over from important systems which may fail. (This is known as redundancy).
For electronic components, make use of a relatively new concept called reconfigurability - the ability of avionics to sense a failure of one of their modules, and adapt their configuration to take account of this, and continue operations as normal.
Design platforms and plan missions and repairs such that finding where failures have occurred in systems (diagnostics) is easy, quick and cheap.
Use systems which can predict the future failure of components and the effect these are likely to have on upcoming missions (prognostics).

All fairly boring stuff, I'm afraid. There do exist, as with Phased Missions, one or two very simple mathematical models but these fail to cut too deep into the issues at heart. So my PhD has to, in addition to considering phased missions modelling, model the performance of MFOPs. In a fleet of aircraft.

There's not really a great deal to say about this subject, short of the fact that it's unlikely that I'll be publishing a thesis set to light the reliability world ablaze with amazing discoveries. It's an idea, but one which probably, ultimately, will not work, because people like things the way they are.

The final post will be about Petri nets. That one will have lots of pretty pictures.

37 - Phased Missions

2009-11-02T13:43:00.003Z

It should, hopefully, be clear to you now that my work involves estimating the probability of systems failing. So far, this has not been too difficult: break things down, put numbers in, get things and numbers out.

Things can rapidly get more complicated, however. Sometimes, systems go through different periods, where certain sub-systems are activated or deactivated at certain times. An example of this would be an aeroplane – the wheels will be up (stowed away) or down (in use) depending on whether the plane is in flight or not. A failure of the landing gear during flight wouldn’t be an issue at that time – it’s only when the plane is coming into land that panic would set in, and, no doubt, some big black dude attempts to get the muthaf***in' snakes off this muthaf***in' plane. So to speak.

Imagine, then, that the plane is performing a mission. This particular aircraft is of the military variety, and it’s flying off to bomb some innocent Iraqi civilians. The different stages of the Innocent Iraqi Civilian Bombing Mission could be:

1. Taxi to runway
2. Take-off
3. Ascent
4. Transit Flight to Innocent Iraqi Town
5. Descent to Bombing Height
6. Bombing of Innocent Iraqi Civilians
7. Ascent to Transit Height
8. Transit Flight Back to Base
9. Descent
10. Landing
11. Taxi to Hangar
12. Dressing-gown, Whisky, Cigar, Long-Haired Cat, Estimated Death Count, Tirade About Dirty Arabs, Job Well Done.

In each of the stages above, the aeroplane will have different systems in use. These different stages are known as "phases". Because of the differing systems, the ways in which the aeroplane failure can be expressed will change from phase to phase. Also, the stresses on the various sub-systems will change, possibly affecting component failure rates. As such, to get an accurate picture of the probability of aeroplane getting through the Innocent Iraqi Civilian Bombing Mission without being shot down by Evil Muslim Terrorists With Russian Rocket Launchers, one must consider each of these stages, or phases, separately.

And so off we trot, putting together fault trees for each phase of the system failure event "Plane In Innocent Iraqi Civilian Bombing Mission Shot Down By Evil Muslim Terrorists With Russian Rocket Launchers", (or PIIICBMSDBEMTWRRL for short). How, then, do we come up with a figure for the success of the overall mission?

Well, one factor is that if any one phase fails, the entire mission fails. But, just to complicate matters, one has to consider whether or not the plane's failure is one where Evil Muslim Terrorists Shot Down The Aircraft And Then Stole All Our Technological Secrets And Killed The Crew, or whether We Forgot Which Country We Were In And Accidentally Destroyed Aylesbury. One is a catastrophic failure, where the platform is lost, the other is a mission failure, where the objectives have not been completed but further missions are possible. The two levels of failure are quite distinct, and may require completely different phase fault trees for each one.

Other interesting factors include inserting phases into the middle of missions, such as when a mid-air refuelling is needed. Hilariously, this very situation occurred with the Nimrod aircraft some time ago. And a catastrophic failure occurred, everyone died, and much hand-wringing began. Or we may need to alter our strategy midflight, because We Accidentally Bombed Aylesbury and so May As Well Bomb Milton Keynes While We're At It. Or the Accidental Bombing of Aylesbury means we have to Abandon Mission and get back to base before anyone realises what's happened. Or the weather got in the way of our Innocent Iraqi Civilian Bombing campaign, and so We Had To Bomb The Afghanis Instead, something which only happens every Thursday.

Considering all these factors can often be very tricky. My PhD is partly to do with evaluating the situations where inserted phases have occurred, or missions have been abandoned, or a probabilistic event (like the weather) forces a change of tack a certain proportion of the time. For a very simple phased mission, mathematical methods already exist to solve them, and have done since the mid-seventies. One of the standard methods assumes a non-repairable system (which can be a very unworldly assumption indeed) and converts all those pretty phase fault trees into a giant behemoth of a mission fault tree. This can then be solved in the usual way. However, this method is a bit big and takes a long time (which engineers hate), so some other methods have been devised to sort through the nitty-gritty and try to get accurate answers more quickly. I won't mention them here, as I'm only giving a brief overview of the problem, but further reading can always take place by reading the relevant papers. Leave a comment if you care.

The penultimate blog in the series is coming next. This is about the other half of what I have to investigate - Maintenance-Free Operating Periods. Yummy.

36 - Anyway, back to the point

2009-10-16T08:47:00.008+01:00

What was I talking about? Oh yes, my PhD. Might as well continue with that.

I believe we were at the point where I had explained how to create a fault tree, and was going to explain how to quantitively analyse it. Because you really want to know this.

So let's assume that you do. This is very easy in one regard and very complex in another.

In a fault tree, if two or more events are connected by an AND gate, the probability of the outcome is simply the multiple of the probabilities of the events. Easy. If, however, the events are connected by an OR gate, the probability can be much more difficult to work out.

Consider the case where you have two dice. What is the probability of getting a six on one OR a six on the other?

Many people would look at this situation and think that the answer is the sum of the probabilities (1/6 + 1/6 = 2/6 = 1/3). This is the intuitive answer, but it is, however, wrong. The reason for this is one that, to be honest, I haven't completely got my head around, but comes down to the fact that if you get a six on one die, you don't care what comes up on the other, even if it is a six. There is an inherent double-counting in the special case of two sixes which needs to be eliminated from the probability.

I will try to show this in the form of a table, if I can quickly google and learn some HTML tabling skills in the next few minutes.

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1						Y
2						Y
3						Y
4						Y
5						Y
6	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y

You see? It's magic what you can find on the internet.

Looking at the above table, there are only eleven cases of getting a six on one die or the other.

Thus, when working out the probability of A OR B (usually written as A + B), this is the sum of the two events minus the product. In the above example, this is 1/6 + 1/6 - 1/36 = 11/36.

If we extend this to be about three dice, the probability becomes much more interesting. There are two ways to work this out. Thinking about the way we solved the above problem, the table needs extending into three dimensions. However, this is slightly impossible on a 2D screen, so I won't bother. Imagine the above table in two states - where the third die has any of the numbers 1 to 5, or where the third die has the number 6. In the first case, the table shown above will apply. The probability of this equals the probability of the third die having the numbers 1 to 5 (5/6) multiplied by the probability of either of the other two dice having a six (11/36, as worked out above). This equals 55/216.

The other case is simply a 6 x 6 table filled with "Y"s . The probability of this is that of the third die having a 6 - 1/6. Thus, the total probability

P(D1=6 OR D2=6 OR D3=6) = 55/216 + 1/6 = 91/216.

This can be worked out more easily by thinking about the general case. I'm not going to derive it, but simply state as fact that it's true. The main way of working out the probability of a number of events, N_c, connected by OR logic, is called the inclusion-exclusion expansion. This is quite tricky to show in HTML form, but I'll give it a go.

P(c1 + c2 + ... + c_Nc) = P(c1) + P(c2) + ... P(c_Nc) - P(c1)P(c2) - P(c1)P(c3) - ... - P(c1)P(c_Nc) - P(c2)P(c3)-...-P(c2)P(c_Nc)-...-P(c_Nc-1)(c_Nc) + P(c1)P(c2)P(c3) + P(c1)P(c2)P(c4)+ ... + P(c1)P(c3)P(c4) + ... + P(c1)P(c_Nc-1) P(c_Nc) + ... + P(c_Nc-2)P(c_Nc-1)P(c_Nc) - ... + (-1)^N_c-1 P(c1)P(c2)P(c3)...P(c_Nc-1)P(c_Nc)

You see? Not easy.

To try put this into as easy an explanation as possible, you sum each of the events' probabilities. After this, sum the probabilities of each combination of two events and subtract this from the previous total. Then sum the probabilities of each combination of three events and add this to the total. Subtract combinations of four events, add combinations of five, and so on, until you either add or subtract the combination of all of the events occurring together, depending on whether the total number of events is odd or even.

To apply this to the dice example,

P(D1=6 + D2=6 + D3=6) = P(D1=6) + P(D2=6) + P(D3=6) - [P(D1=6).P(D2=6) + P(D1=6).P(D3=6) + P(D2=6).P(D3=6) ] + P(D1=6).P(D2=6).P(D3=6)

P = 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 - 3/36 + 1/216
P = 108/216 - 18/216 + 1/216 = 91/216

This is the same answer as above.

When working with fault trees, this is the way to solve them. It sounds difficult, but in reality it's not too bad. Something I forgot to mention in the previous blog was that there are these things called cut sets. These describe combinations of component failures (or basic events) which, if they all occur, will definitely cause the system to fail. These can be minimised to get the set of minimal cut sets. The probability of each of these is the product of the failure probabilities of the components within them. Just one inclusion-exclusion expansion is needed for the whole fault tree to be solved. Voila.

I hope this has been an education for you, and that it is understandable. Right, I need a poo. Ta-ra.

P.S. Next up - Phased Missions. Fun.

35 - Back now. Sry.

2009-10-16T08:41:00.003+01:00

Hey. Sorry about that. Got a bit distracted. Sort of figured that it was more important to focus on doing my PhD than writing about it. Never mind, eh? Only took me six months. Blimey. Didn't realise it had been that long.

For those who care, the reason that I am able to write this blog now is not because I've finished the PhD - God forbid - but because I'm running simulations and need to wait for those to finish before I can write the last couple of chapters on the results and conclusions. That should take about another few weeks or so.

However, if you fancy helping me out with these, I would be eternally grateful. I might even buy you a drink. It's a really simple thing to run, although it does take up a teensy bit of processor time (100% if left alone). And it takes ages to run 1000 simulations, where "ages" depends on the speed of your processor.

Anyhoo, if you fancy giving me a hand, drop me a comment or an email and I'll send you a zip file with all the instructions and necessary files, and you just run it, create an output text file, and email it back to me. Deal?

This would be a whole big piece of awesome if you could help. Cheers

34 - Interruption: Ben Goldacre on Matthias Rath

2009-04-10T10:17:00.003+01:00

This is an interruption to the previous series of blogs on reliability. I will continue with that - promise! - but for now, I wanted to include this to help it get maximum publicity.

I am not claiming in any way any rights on what is written below. It has been published under a Creative Commons licence, which means that I can publish what he's written, as long as it's in full, and given reference and credit. It's taken from his excellent website, Bad Science, which is well worth a long and in-depth read.

The story behind it is that Ben Goldacre recently got sued by a man named Matthias Rath. The lawsuit was dropped, and, in the words of BG, "I think this means I win." Because he was being sued, the chapter below couldn't be included in his new book Bad Science. It's now been included in the new paperback version, to which I have linked above, and published online for you all to read. And it's important.

Read on...

This is an extract from
BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre
Published by Harper Perennial 2009.

You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it, reprint it, read it aloud,

as long as you don’t change it – including this bit –
so that people know that they can find more ideas for free at www.badscience.net

The Doctor Will Sue You Now

This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally,and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought onlymixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow.

Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents. On this last point there is, however, one small consolation, and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My notes, references and witness statements, boxed up in the room where I am sitting right now, make a pile as tall as the man himself, and what I will write here is only a tiny fraction of the fuller story that is waiting to be told about him. This chapter, I should also mention, is available free online for anyone who wishes to see it.

Matthias Rath takes us rudely outside the contained, almost academic distance of this book. For the most part we’ve been interested in the intellectual and cultural consequences of bad science, the made-up facts in national newspapers, dubious academic practices in universities, some foolish pill-peddling, and so on. But what happens if we take these sleights of hand, these pill-marketing techniques, and transplant them out of our decadent Western context into a situation where things really matter?

In an ideal world this would be only a thought experiment. AIDS is the opposite of anecdote. Twenty-five million people have died from it already, three million in the last year alone, and 500,000 of those deaths were children. In South Africa it kills 300,000 people every year: that’s eight hundred people every day, or one every two minutes. This one country has 6.3 million people who are HIV positive, including 30 per cent of all pregnant women. There are 1.2 million AIDS orphans under the age of seventeen. Most chillingly of all, this disaster has appeared suddenly, and while we were watching: in 1990, just 1 per cent of adults in South Africa were HIV positive. Ten years later, the figure had risen to 25 per cent.

It’s hard to mount an emotional response to raw numbers, but on one thing I think we would agree. If you were to walk into a situation with that much death, misery and disease, you would be very careful to make sure that you knew what you were talking about. For the reasons you are about to read, I suspect that Matthias Rath missed the mark.

This man, we should be clear, is our responsibility. Born and raised in Germany, Rath was the head of Cardiovascular Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto in California, and even then he had a tendency towards grand gestures, publishing a paper in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine in 1992 titled ‘A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a Cause for Human Mortality’. The unified theory was high-dose vitamins.

He first developed a power base from sales in Europe, selling his pills with tactics that will be very familiar to you from the rest of this book, albeit slightly more aggressive. In the UK, his adverts claimed that ‘90 per cent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within months of starting treatment’, and suggested that three million lives could be saved if cancer patients stopped being treated by conventional medicine. The pharmaceutical industry was deliberately letting people die for financial gain, he explained. Cancer treatments were ‘poisonous compounds’ with ‘not even one effective treatment’. The decision to embark on treatment for cancer can be the most difficult that an individual or a family will ever take, representing a close balance between well-documented benefits and equally well-documented side-effects. Adverts like these might play especially strongly on your conscience if your mother has just lost all her hair to chemotherapy, for example, in the hope of staying alive just long enough to see your son speak. There was some limited regulatory response in Europe, but it was generally as weak as that faced by the other characters in this book. The Advertising Standards Authority criticised one of his adverts in the UK, but that is essentially all they are able to do. Rath was ordered by a Berlin court to stop claiming that his vitamins could cure cancer, or face a €250,000 fine.

But sales were strong, and Matthias Rath still has many supporters in Europe, as you will shortly see. He walked into South Africa with all the acclaim, self-confidence and wealth he had amassed as a successful vitamin-pill entrepreneur in Europe and America, and began to take out full-page adverts in newspapers.

‘The answer to the AIDS epidemic is here,’ he proclaimed. Anti-retroviral drugs were poisonous, and a conspiracy to kill patients and make money. ‘Stop AIDS Genocide by the Drugs Cartel’ said one headline. ‘Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS.’ The answer came in the form of vitamin pills. ‘Multivitamin treatment is more effective than any toxic AIDS drug.’‘Multivitamins cut the risk of developing AIDS in half.’

Rath’s company ran clinics reflecting these ideas, and in 2005 he decided to run a trial of his vitamins in a township near Cape Town called Khayelitsha, giving his own formulation, VitaCell, to people with advanced AIDS. In 2008 this trial was declared illegal by the Cape High Court of South Africa. Although Rath says that none of his participants had been on anti-retroviral drugs, some relatives have given statements saying that they were, and were actively told to stop using them.

Tragically,Matthias Rath had taken these ideas to exactly the right place. Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa at the time, was well known as an ‘AIDS dissident’, and to international horror, while people died at the rate of one every two minutes in his country, he gave credence and support to the claims of a small band of campaigners who variously claim that AIDS does not exist, that it is not caused by HIV, that anti-retroviral medication does more harm than good, and so on.

At various times during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa their government argued that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and that anti-retroviral drugs are not useful for patients. They refused to roll out proper treatment programmes, they refused to accept free donations of drugs, and they refused to accept grant money from the Global Fund to buy drugs.

One study estimates that if the South African national government had used anti-retroviral drugs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape province (which defied national policy on the issue), around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007. Another study estimates that between 2000 and 2005 there were 330,000 unnecessary deaths, 2.2 million person years lost, and 35,000 babies unnecessarily born with HIV because of the failure to implement a cheap and simple mother-to-child-transmission prevention program.

Between one and three doses of an ARV drug can reduce transmission dramatically. The cost is negligible. It was not available. Interestingly, Matthias Rath’s colleague and employee, a South African barrister named Anthony Brink, takes the credit for introducing Thabo Mbeki to many of these ideas. Brink stumbled on the ‘AIDS dissident’ material in the mid-1990s, and after much surfing and reading, became convinced that it must be right. In 1999 he wrote an article about AZT in a Johannesburg newspaper titled ‘a medicine from hell’. This led to a public exchange with a leading virologist. Brink contacted Mbeki, sending him copies of the debate, and was welcomed as an expert. This is a chilling testament to the danger of elevating cranks by engaging with them.

In his initial letter of motivation for employment to Matthias Rath, Brink described himself as ‘South Africa’s leading AIDS dissident, best known for my whistle-blowing exposé of the toxicity and inefficacy of AIDS drugs, and for my political activism in this regard, which caused President Mbeki and Health Minister Dr Tshabalala-Msimang to repudiate the drugs in 1999’.

In 2000, the now infamous International AIDS Conference took place in Durban. Mbeki’s presidential advisory panel beforehand was packed with ‘AIDS dissidents’, including Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. On the first day, Rasnick suggested that all HIV testing should be banned on principle, and that South Africa should stop screening supplies of blood for HIV. ‘If I had the power to outlaw the HIV antibody test,’ he said, ‘I would do it across the board.’When African physicians gave testimony about the drastic change AIDS had caused in their clinics and hospitals, Rasnick said he had not seen ‘any evidence’ of an AIDS catastrophe. The media were not allowed in, but one reporter from the Village Voice was present. Peter Duesberg, he said, ‘gave a presentation so removed from African medical reality that it left several local doctors shaking their heads’. It wasn’t AIDS that was killing babies and children, said the dissidents: it was the anti-retroviral medication.

President Mbeki sent a letter to world leaders comparing the struggle of the ‘AIDS dissidents’ to the struggle against apartheid. The Washington Post described the reaction at the White House: ‘So stunned were some officials by the letter’s tone and timing – during final preparations for July’s conference in Durban – that at least two of them, according to diplomatic sources, felt obliged to check whether it was genuine.’Hundreds of delegates walked out of Mbeki’s address to the conference in disgust, but many more described themselves as dazed and confused. Over 5,000 researchers and activists around the world signed up to the Durban Declaration, a document that specifically addressed and repudiated the claims and concerns – at least the more moderate ones – of the ‘AIDS dissidents’. Specifically, it addressed the charge that people were simply dying of poverty: The evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clearcut, exhaustive and unambiguous … As with any other chronic infection, various co-factors play a role in determining the risk of disease. Persons who are malnourished, who already suffer other infections or who are older, tend to be more susceptible to the rapid development of AIDS following HIV infection.

However, none of these factors weaken the scientific evidence that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS … Mother-to-child transmission can be reduced by half or more by short courses of antiviral drugs … What works best in one country may not be appropriate in another. But to tackle the disease, everyone must first understand that HIV is the enemy. Research, not myths, will lead to the development of more effective and cheaper treatments.

It did them no good. Until 2003 the South African government refused, as a matter of principle, to roll out proper antiretroviral medication programmes, and even then the process was half-hearted. This madness was only overturned after a massive campaign by grassroots organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign, but even after the ANC cabinet voted to allow medication to be given, there was still resistance. In mid-2005, at least 85 per cent of HIV-positive people who needed anti-retroviral drugs were still refused them. That’s around a million people.

This resistance, of course, went deeper than just one man; much of it came from Mbeki’s Health Minister,Manto Tshabalala- Msimang. An ardent critic of medical drugs for HIV, she would cheerfully go on television to talk up their dangers, talk down their benefits, and became irritable and evasive when asked how many patients were receiving effective treatment. She declared in 2005 that she would not be ‘pressured’ into meeting the target of three million patients on anti-retroviral medication, that people had ignored the importance of nutrition, and that she would continue to warn patients of the sideeffects of anti-retrovirals, saying: ‘We have been vindicated in this regard.We are what we eat.’

It’s an eerily familiar catchphrase. Tshabalala-Msimang has also gone on record to praise the work of Matthias Rath, and refused to investigate his activities. Most joyfully of all, she is a staunch advocate of the kind of weekend glossy-magazine-style nutritionism that will by now be very familiar to you. The remedies she advocates for AIDS are beetroot, garlic, lemons and African potatoes. A fairly typical quote, from the Health Minister in a country where eight hundred people die every day from AIDS, is this: ‘Raw garlic and a skin of the lemon – not only do they give you a beautiful face and skin but they also protect you from disease.’ South Africa’s stand at the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto was described by delegates as the ‘salad stall’. It consisted of some garlic, some beetroot, the African potato, and assorted other vegetables. Some boxes of anti-retroviral drugs were added later, but they were reportedly borrowed at the last minute from other conference delegates.

Alternative therapists like to suggest that their treatments and ideas have not been sufficiently researched. As you now know, this is often untrue, and in the case of the Health Minister’s favoured vegetables, research had indeed been done, with results that were far from promising. Interviewed on SABC about this, Tshabalala-Msimang gave the kind of responses you’d expect to hear at any North London dinner-party discussion of alternative therapies.

First she was asked about work from the University of Stellenbosch which suggested that her chosen plant, the African potato, might be actively dangerous for people on AIDS drugs. One study on African potato in HIV had to be terminated prematurely, because the patients who received the plant extract developed severe bone-marrow suppression and a drop in their CD4 cell count – which is a bad thing – after eight weeks. On top of this, when extract from the same vegetable was given to cats with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, they succumbed to full-blown Feline AIDS faster than their non-treated controls. African potato does not look like a good bet.

Tshabalala-Msimang disagreed: the researchers should go back to the drawing board, and ‘investigate properly’. Why? Because HIV-positive people who used African potato had shown improvement, and they had said so themselves. If a person says he or she is feeling better, should this be disputed, she demanded to know, merely because it had not been proved scientifically? ‘When a person says she or he is feeling better, I must say “No, I don’t think you are feeling better”? “I must rather go and do science on you”?’ Asked whether there should be a scientific basis to her views, she replied: ‘Whose science?’

And there, perhaps, is a clue, if not exoneration. This is a continent that has been brutally exploited by the developed world, first by empire, and then by globalised capital. Conspiracy theories about AIDS and Western medicine are not entirely absurd in this context. The pharmaceutical industry has indeed been caught performing drug trials in Africa which would be impossible anywhere in the developed world. Many find it suspicious that black Africans seem to be the biggest victims of AIDS, and point to the biological warfare programmes set up by the apartheid governments; there have also been suspicions that the scientific discourse of HIV/AIDS might be a device, a Trojan horse for spreading even more exploitative Western political and economic agendas around a problem that is simply one of poverty.

And these are new countries, for which independence and self-rule are recent developments, which are struggling to find their commercial feet and true cultural identity after centuries of colonisation. Traditional medicine represents an important link with an autonomous past; besides which, anti-retroviral medications have been unnecessarily – offensively, absurdly – expensive, and until moves to challenge this became partially successful, many Africans were effectively denied access to medical treatment as a result.

It’s very easy for us to feel smug, and to forget that we all have our own strange cultural idiosyncrasies which prevent us from taking up sensible public-health programmes. For examples,we don’t even have to look as far as MMR. There is a good evidence base, for example, to show that needle-exchange programmes reduce the spread of HIV, but this strategy has been rejected time and again in favour of ‘Just say no.’ Development charities funded by US Christian groups refuse to engage with birth control, and any suggestion of abortion, even in countries where being in control of your own fertility could mean the difference between success and failure in life, is met with a cold, pious stare. These impractical moral principles are so deeply entrenched that Pepfar, the US Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has insisted that every recipient of international aid money must sign a declaration expressly promising not to have any involvement with sex workers.

We mustn’t appear insensitive to the Christian value system, but it seems to me that engaging sex workers is almost the cornerstone of any effective AIDS policy: commercial sex is frequently the ‘vector of transmission’, and sex workers a very high-risk population; but there are also more subtle issues at stake. If you secure the legal rights of prostitutes to be free from violence and discrimination, you empower them to demand universal condom use, and that way you can prevent HIV from being spread into the whole community. This is where science meets culture. But perhaps even to your own friends and neighbours, in whatever suburban idyll has become your home, the moral principle of abstinence from sex and drugs is more important than people dying of AIDS; and perhaps, then, they are no less irrational than Thabo Mbeki.

So this was the situation into which the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath inserted himself, prominently and expensively, with the wealth he had amassed from Europe and America, exploiting anti-colonial anxieties with no sense of irony, although he was a white man offering pills made in a factory abroad. His adverts and clinics were a tremendous success. He began to tout individual patients as evidence of the benefits that could come from vitamin pills – although in reality some of his most famous success stories have died of AIDS. When asked about the deaths of Rath’s star patients, Health Minister Tshabalala-Msimang replied: ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean that if I am taking antibiotics and I die, that I died of antibiotics.’

She is not alone: South Africa’s politicians have consistently refused to step in, Rath claims the support of the government, and its most senior figures have refused to distance themselves from his operations or to criticise his activities. Tshabalala-Msimang has gone on the record to state that the Rath Foundation ‘are not undermining the government’s position. If anything, they are supporting it.’

In 2005, exasperated by government inaction, a group of 199 leading medical practitioners in South Africa signed an open letter to the health authorities of the Western Cape, pleading for action on the Rath Foundation. ‘Our patients are being inundated with propaganda encouraging them to stop life-saving medicine,’ it said. ‘Many of us have had experiences with HIV infected patients who have had their health compromised by stopping their anti-retrovirals due to the activities of this Foundation.’ Rath’s adverts continue unabated. He even claimed that his activities were endorsed by huge lists of sponsors and affiliates including the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNAIDS. All have issued statements flatly denouncing his claims and activities. The man certainly has chutzpah.

His adverts are also rich with detailed scientific claims. It would be wrong of us to neglect the science in this story, so we should follow some through, specifically those which focused on a Harvard study in Tanzania. He described this research in full-page advertisements, some of which have appeared in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. He refers to these paid adverts, I should mention, as if he had received flattering news coverage in the same papers. Anyway, this research showed that multivitamin supplements can be beneficial in a developing world population with AIDS: there’s no problem with that result, and there are plenty of reasons to think that vitamins might have some benefit for a sick and frequently malnourished population.

The researchers enrolled 1,078 HIV-positive pregnant women and randomly assigned them to have either a vitamin supplement or placebo. Notice once again, if you will, that this is another large, well-conducted, publicly funded trial of vitamins, conducted by mainstream scientists, contrary to the claims of nutritionists that such studies do not exist.

The women were followed up for several years, and at the end of the study, 25 per cent of those on vitamins were severely ill or dead, compared with 31 per cent of those on placebo. There was also a statistically significant benefit in CD4 cell count (a measure of HIV activity) and viral loads. These results were in no sense dramatic – and they cannot be compared to the demonstrable life-saving benefits of anti-retrovirals – but they did show that improved diet, or cheap generic vitamin pills, could represent a simple and relatively inexpensive way to marginally delay the need to start HIV medication in some patients.

In the hands of Rath, this study became evidence that vitamin pills are superior to medication in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, that anti-retroviral therapies ‘severely damage all cells in the body – including white blood cells’, and worse, that they were ‘thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic’. The researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health were so horrified that they put together a press release setting out their support for medication, and stating starkly, with unambiguous clarity, that Matthias Rath had misrepresented their findings. Media regulators failed to act.

To outsiders the story is baffling and terrifying. The United Nations has condemned Rath’s adverts as ‘wrong and misleading’. ‘This guy is killing people by luring them with unrecognised treatment without any scientific evidence,’ said Eric Goemaere, head of Médecins sans Frontières SA, a man who pioneered anti-retroviral therapy in South Africa. Rath sued him.

It’s not just MSF who Rath has gone after. He has also brought time-consuming, expensive, stalled or failed cases against a professor of AIDS research, critics in the media and others.

His most heinous campaign has been against the Treatment Action Campaign. For many years this has been the key organisation campaigning for access to anti-retroviral medication in South Africa, and it has been fighting a war on four fronts. Firstly, it campaigns against its own government, trying to compel it to roll out treatment programmes for the population. Secondly, it fights against the pharmaceutical industry, which claims that it needs to charge full price for its products in developing countries in order to pay for research and development of new drugs – although, as we shall see, out of its $550 billion global annual revenue, the pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on promotion and admin as it does on research and development. Thirdly, it is a grassroots organisation, made up largely of black women from townships who do important prevention and treatment-literacy work on the ground, ensuring that people know what is available, and how to protect themselves. Lastly, it fights against people who promote the type of information peddled by Matthias Rath and his like. Rath has taken it upon himself to launch a massive campaign against this group. He distributes advertising material against them, saying ‘Treatment Action Campaign medicines are killing you’ and ‘Stop AIDS genocide by the drug cartel’, claiming – as you will guess by now – that there is an international conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies intent on prolonging the AIDS crisis in the interests of their own profits by giving medication that makes people worse. TAC must be a part of this, goes the reasoning, because it criticises Matthias Rath. Just like me writing on Patrick Holford or Gillian McKeith, TAC is perfectly in favour of good diet and nutrition. But in Rath’s promotional literature it is a front for the pharmaceutical industry, a ‘Trojan horse’ and a ‘running dog’. TAC has made a full disclosure of its funding and activities, showing no such connection: Rath presented no evidence to the contrary, and has even lost a court case over the issue, but will not let it lie. In fact he presents the loss of this court case as if it was a victory.

The founder of TAC is a man called Zackie Achmat, and he is the closest thing I have to a hero. He is South African, and coloured, by the nomenclature of the apartheid system in which he grew up.At the age of fourteen he tried to burn down his school, and you might have done the same in similar circumstances. He has been arrested and imprisoned under South Africa’s violent, brutal white regime, with all that entailed. He is also gay, and HIV-positive, and he refused to take anti-retroviral medication until it was widely available to all on the public health system, even when he was dying of AIDS, even when he was personally implored to save himself by Nelson Mandela, a public supporter of anti-retroviral medication and Achmat’s work.

And now, at last, we come to the lowest point of this whole story, not merely for Matthias Rath’s movement, but for the alternative therapy movement around the world as a whole. In 2007, with a huge public flourish, to great media coverage, Rath’s former employee Anthony Brink filed a formal complaint against Zackie Achmat, the head of the TAC. Bizarrely, he filed this complaint with the International Criminal Court at The Hague, accusing Achmat of genocide for successfully campaigning to get access to HIV drugs for the people of South Africa.

It’s hard to explain just how influential the ‘AIDS dissidents’ are in South Africa. Brink is a barrister, a man with important friends, and his accusations were reported in the national news media – and in some corners of the Western gay press – as a serious news story. I do not believe that any one of those journalists who reported on it can possibly have read Brink’s indictment to the end.

I have.

The first fifty-seven pages present familiar anti-medication and ‘AIDS-dissident’ material. But then, on page fifty-eight, this ‘indictment’ document suddenly deteriorates into something altogether more vicious and unhinged, as Brink sets out what he believes would be an appropriate punishment for Zackie. Because I do not wish to be accused of selective editing, I will now reproduce for you that entire section, unedited, so you can see and feel it for yourself.

The document was described by the Rath Foundation as ‘entirely valid and long overdue’. This story isn’t about Matthias Rath, or Anthony Brink, or Zackie Achmat, or even South Africa. It is about the culture of how ideas work, and how that can break down. Doctors criticise other doctors, academics criticise academics, politicians criticise politicians: that’s normal and healthy, it’s how ideas improve. Matthias Rath is an alternative therapist, made in Europe.He is every bit the same as the British operators that we have seen in this book. He is from their world.

Despite the extremes of this case, not one single alternative therapist or nutritionist, anywhere in the world, has stood up to criticise any single aspect of the activities of Matthias Rath and his colleagues. In fact, far from it: he continues to be fêted to this day. I have sat in true astonishment and watched leading figures of the UK’s alternative therapy movement applaud Matthias Rath at a public lecture (I have it on video, just in case there’s any doubt). Natural health organisations continue to defend Rath. Homeopaths’ mailouts continue to promote his work. The British Association of Nutritional Therapists has been invited to comment by bloggers, but declined. Most, when challenged, will dissemble. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘I don’t really know much about it.’ Not one person will step forward and dissent.

The alternative therapy movement as a whole has demonstrated itself to be so dangerously, systemically incapable of critical self-appraisal that it cannot step up even in a case like that of Rath: in that count I include tens of thousands of practitioners, writers, administrators and more. This is how ideas go badly wrong. In the conclusion to this book, written before I was able to include this chapter, I will argue that the biggest dangers posed by the material we have covered are cultural and intellectual.

I may be mistaken.

This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works License described here, you’re free to copy it wherever you like as long as you keep it whole, and do please point people back here to badscience.net so that if they like it, they know where to find more for free.

33 - My PhD - Part 2: Failure Logic

2009-01-26T10:24:00.008Z

Having explained all about what reliability is, the problem is now how to apply it. We need to know how well systems such as computers, aeroplanes, ships, and so on, will perform in terms of reliability, but often it is far too expensive to find this out by experimentation. We cannot take a large representative sample and test them until they break, as the expense of this is far too prohibitive.

So what can we do? Well, instead of trying to directly find the reliability of the overall system, we consider that the failure of a system is actually due to the failure of the things which make up the system. We then use logic to break the system's failure down into the failures of the constituent components.

For instance, consider a computer. Someone who has no experience with computers turns it on, and your operating system (like Windows) summarily fails to appear on the screen. This, if you like, is the "top level" problem - the major issue which affects the user. If we had a think about how this might have happened, someone with slightly more computery knowledge might suggest the following things:

The monitor isn't turned on
The monitor isn't plugged in
The computer isn't plugged in
The monitor has failed
The computer has failed
The connection between the monitor and the computer has failed
The electrical power supply to the computer's plug has failed
Try turning it off and on again

Apart from the last suggestion, these are various things which would result in a computer not showing your OS. I think it's exhaustive, but maybe there are one or two things that I've missed. Any one of these things (each of which is known as an event) could cause the top level problem, as could any combination of them. This means that there is an "OR" relationship between the top level event and these events. The top event will happen if event 1 or event 2 or event 3, and so on, happens.

We can then apply the same principle to each of these events in turn. Before I move onto this, though, I just want to point out the other "relationship" between a set of events, similar the "OR" one I mentioned above. Consider the top event "Something sets on fire". For this to happen, some things need to happen together:

There needs to be something to burn - natural gas, wood, plastic, anything that can be a fuel for the fire.
There needs to be enough oxygen for the fuel to burn, but not so much that it can't burn (there can be too much oxygen for a fire)
There needs to be a source of ignition - a match, a flame, a spark.

If any one these things is not in place, "something sets on fire" cannot happen. This means that there is an "AND" relationship between the top event and events 1 to 3: "Something sets on fire" if event 1 and event 2 and event 3 happen.

Usually using just these two relationships between events, we can break down a system's failure into the failures of smaller components of the system. If we were to do this using just words, as I have done so far, then this would become quite unwieldy. Thankfully, though, we have methods of presenting information on the failure of a system much more concisely. One of the most popular of these is a fault tree.

A fault tree is just an expression of the sort of logic that I have shown. It is made up of shapes which represent events and gates. An AND gate is shown by the first of the following symbols, while an OR gate is shown by the second of them:

Note the flat line at the bottom of the AND gate, and the curved one for the OR gate. The single line sticking out of the top of each gate links to the single higher-level event (such as the top events I mentioned earlier), while the several lines coming out of the bottom are for each of the inputting, lower-level events which are the causes of the top event.

The events themselves come in three types:

Top event - the overall problem which we are trying to solve. Examples include "car fails", "computer fails", "building collapses", and so on. There is only ever one of these in any fault tree. Shown as a rectangle with a description of the event inside.
Basic event - when we have broken the top event down into the combinations of smaller and smaller failures, and we reach the lowest level to which we wish to go, those at the lowest level are known as basic events. These are typically failures of small components. For the computer example, consider examples such as "processor fails", "memory chip fails", and so on. Note that these examples will themselves have smaller and smaller causes, such as overheating and so on, but we are not so interested in them as, for the common home user, once they know that a memory stick or a processor has failed, they will simply seek to replace it, without being too bothered about the nature or the cause of the failure. Shown as a circle with a description of the event inside.
Intermediate event - any event which combines basic or other intermediate events but is not the top event. Shown as a rectangle with a description of the event inside.

Using just these five simple symbols, we have a remarkably massive ability to explain the failure of a large system in terms of the small things which ultimately cause it. An example fault tree is shown below for the computer example:

(Click to embiggen it)

The triangle underneath "computer fails" is a symbol to indicate that the event there has lower causes, and they will be put on the fault tree, but I haven't got around to it yet/couldn't be arsed.

Apologies if the fault tree doesn't show up as well as I was hoping, but blame blogger.com for that.

To finish up, then, you've been shown how reliability engineers commonly use logical methods to break down a big problem into smaller and smaller problems, linked by OR and AND relationships. These are commonly displayed on Fault Trees, which have been explained to you (and if you don't understand them, it's your fault, not mine). If you want to read more, do some searching on google and read some articles. I'm not a library. Here's a fairly crap wikipedia article which doesn't explain them terribly well for the layman.

The next blog will explain some mathsy stuff about probabilities. What has been shown here is a qualitative method - we find the causes of a problem, but without assigning likelihoods to any of them. Fault trees provide a nifty quantitative method of finding the probability of the top event by using those of the basic events. Tune in whenever I write it for more interesting information on my current research and job!

32 - My PhD - Part 1: Reliability

2009-01-23T10:22:00.005Z

I've not posted in ages. Sorry. Been stupidly busy with my PhD.

Because I get asked so much about it, I thought I'd try to provide here (in as many posts as it takes) an explanation of exactly what the hell I'm up to. And besides, it's my blog and I can do what I like. Plus, I have to try to prove that I'm not still obsessing about gays.

So, first things first: Reliability. This is the core, the centre, of my work and its application is quite important. Reliability is a property of an item, such as (drawing inspiration from those things immediately around me) a phone, computer, mug, and so on. If properly defined and investigated, it allows us engineers to assess how likely the phone, computer, oil tanker, spaceship, etc. is to fail after a given amount of time.

Now, for commercial companies that sell phones, computers, etc., it can be a part of the marketing: "Reliable" is a very good selling point for such things. For instance, if you knew that one specific computer in a shop was 99% likely to still be fully operational in five years' time, you'd probably be tempted to buy it over the other ones.

Hopefully you can see that reliability is just a probability that changes over time: while my computer has a 100% chance of working when I buy it, that probability reduces over time, so it could be 95% likely to work in a year's time, 90% in two years, and so on.

If the computer does fail, then we can take it to a shop and get it fixed. If we consider the life of a computer (assuming that I don't just get shot of it after the third time of failure!), then it is a cycle of working - failed - working - failed and so on. The proportion of the time that it spends in the "working" state over its lifetime is known as its availability. The amount of time it spends in the "failed" state over its lifetime is called - unsurprisingly - its unavailability.

You might think that all this is rather trivial and unimportant. Think, though, for a second, about computers, iPods, cameras, which are expensive items for the consumer to buy. They need confidence that the item they buy won't stop working within a month, which is why laws are in place to protect the consumer from this, and companies offer extended warranties. For spaceships, space agencies need confidence that the phenomenally expensive and complex systems they are sending into space won't just pack up before the mission has even got off the ground (fnar fnar). Commercial aircraft operators need to know how to maintain their aircraft so that they won't have 250 deaths splashed across the papers the next day, with all the accompanying bad publicity, wailing relatives and compensation claims. Military aircraft operators need to know how to maintain their aircraft so they will have 250 deaths splashed across the papers the next day. Reliability is very, very important in today's world.

If you still don't believe me, consider the incidences where things have gone wrong - Piper Alpha, Chernobyl for starters, but on smaller scales, the IBM Deathstar, summer Tube breakdowns, various rail accidents. Failures, and systems with high failure rates (that is, the expected number of failures in a given period of time), can have devastating consequences.

Finding out, then, the probability of a system failing after a given period of time is critical. If the reliability is of a good enough standard, then the system can be sold, bought, used, etc. with a high degree of confidence. Similarly, if a company proves that it has done everything reasonably in its power to reduce failures and the effects of those failures, then it cannot be prosecuted if things go wrong (although you might argue that if things go badly wrong, then it probably wasn't doing everything properly anyway).

"Risk" is a figure which combines both the probability of an incident happening, and the consequences of that incident. The two latter figures are quantified in some way and then multiplied together to give a value for risk. For instance, most problems associated with gasholders (terrible article alert) have a moderately high probability but would not cause any fatalities. The big problems (the whole damn thing blowing up, for instance) is very low-risk, has never happened in the UK, in fact, but has high consequences. As long as one figure is low when the other is high, the risk of anything will be quite low. Risk assessment, then, is a case of establishing likely values for the probability of an incident, and the consequences of it should it happen.

Finding out the various reliability figures for a system is not easy, though. It is always possible to find out the values through testing. Usually, thought, for things like computers, trains, spaceships, you can't just make a thousand units and test them all to destruction, and do statistics to find the answer. It's just far too expensive both in terms of time, resources and money. Because of this, we have to resort to less interesting measures of estimating system reliability, which is what I will share with you in the next blog.

31 - I think I've found the funniest yootoob comment

2008-12-18T15:20:00.003Z

There are members of my family and those in my wider social circle who actually read this blog, apparently. For the benefit of those people, I'd like to point out a site called YouTube. There are people who like to spend their time recording videos for the site, such as parodies and funny stories, just reciting (boring) anecdotes about their lives, and so on. Occasionally one comes across something which is actually rather good, such as this guy (no, it really is a guy, honest) crying about Britney "Mental" Spears - warning, lots of sweary-poos. The problem with YouTube, in the main, is that it allows people to say things.

So if one ever comes across a video, such as Adam Buxton's "Help the Police", and one scrolls through the comments, eventually one will get to flashes of insight such as

- thats sooooo ... gay the men gay the boy gay the women ähh bitch coz N.W.A NOT Firndly to police

- not to sound racist, but it has been scientifically proven that "white people" are, in fact, muchly more mentally evolved than african americans.

- F*** THE POLICE not help em. This is gay as hell.

I don't even want to talk about some of the comments on the video of Prince Charles and Princess Camilla's wedding, but I'm sure you get the idea. By the way, as a little aside, I'd just like to point out that Diana, POW, is dead. And I'm sure that as a result she doesn't care about Charles getting his end away with the woman he loves.

You do sometimes, however, come across some genuine insight, which is why I'm writing this blog. Some time ago I watched the Jools Holland show, and a chap called Yoav did a remarkable song, and I thus bought his album (I'm listening to it now). Having deleted the programme from our V+ box, I thought I'd look it up on choochoob and found it, here. And what did I see lurking in the comments below, on page 2?

hollowwitch (6 months ago)
Yes, he certainly is talented, which makes me mad because I'm not talented at all, but then I don't look like Louis theroux and he does. But then he may have a ten inch cock which would make me even madder!! Oh it's all too confusing, the guy's so talented he actually deserves a ten inch wanger. I hate him, he's great.

Best ever? I think so.

30 - Oh! The Horror! Oh! The Pain! The Trials and Tribulations of not caring about the Credit Crunch

2008-10-24T08:58:00.005+01:00

I've tried, I really have, promise. But the thing is, I'm struggling. Every morning, I wake up and try to get myself to go along with it, to feel something in some way, but I just can't. It doesn't work. No matter how hard I try, to me, the Credit Crunch is just something that is happening to Other People. And as such, it classes as entertainment, rather than something to worry about.

The sheer amount of bullshit we have read in the last few weeks regarding this thing just boggles the mind. The newspapers are practically humping the credit crunch's leg... look, get off! Just fuck off you bloody thing! Oh no! Not tha... oh, you went and came on my jeans. Great job, you bollocks.

So the world is entering a recession. We're all doomed, the end of life as we know it, why don't we all just crawl into our respective corners and fucking well die?

Economics has always seemed to me half mathematical and half psychological (and I say this as someone with a good deal of knowledge about mathematical things, a lot of made-up nonsense on psychological things and almost no knowledge about economical things) - it's all well and good relying on your mathematical models, watching the numbers jump up and down on your little computer screen all day long, going for eight fag-breaks a day and swearing profusely at anyone who isn't you, but as soon as someone says the word "recession", everyone starts panicking, trying to sell all their shares because the short-term losses could literally make the world explode.

One of the causes of this, I feel, is that banking institutions typically employ bold, brash, volatile people who like to take risks. The problem with these sorts of people is that, sooner or later, enough of them will make too many bad mistakes at the same time and the whole thing goes tits up.

And let's have a think about the media for a second - for weeks now we've had it rammed down our necks that houses prices are going down, we're having a recession; banks are going bust, we're having a recession; shares are dropping, we're having a recession; house sales have stopped, we're having a recession; confidence is low, we're having a recession; shops are reporting massive sales drops, we're having a recession; Gas prices are going up, we're having a recession; etc. etc. ad infinitum. All of which feeds into that psychological dump in the financial industry and makes the whole thing worse. So, basically, the people responsible for the Credit Crunch are: American investment bankers, all other investment bankers in the entire world, politicians and journalists. So burn the fuckers.

Meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy being in a secure industry (oil and gas - people need them no matter what the prices, haha), with no pension, savings or mortgage, a contracted rent and low utility bills. And while I do so, I can watch the world convince itself to collapse.

29 - More Gayness

2008-10-23T18:00:00.002+01:00

Argh. I thought I'd add a quick blog here, partly because I feel slightly guilty at my very low recent post-rate, and also because I feel it's worth pointing out some more of my realisations about the Bible.

I recently got into a... let's call it a "debate" about homosexuality and the Church - deliberately - because I wanted to test out my views on my fellow twenty-somethings. We had just been at church down here in the Saaf, and had gone to the pub afterwards for a drink.

Firstly, I was astounded to hear that there are several people of my age who don't accept that gay people are naturally gay. It turns out that, as far as this issue is concerned, I am somewhat ahead of the race here. Study* of sexuality in identical twins, who share the same genes and DNA, shows many examples of one being hetero and one being homo, while also showing more condordance in homosexuality between identical twins (52% in one study) than non-identical twins (22%). Thus: homosexuality cannot be purely and simply down to genetics, but genes do play a non-negligible role. There are many other studies investigating many possible or plausible causes of homosexuality in humans, and from these there is, as yet, no definitive answer for what the causes are. Of note is the fact that as a woman gives birth to more and more males, the chances of each successive boy becoming gay increases the probability of his being gay by 33%.

Studies of home-video tape (or homo-video tape, ha ha) of children can often display young lads who enjoy playing with dolls and other "girly" things, or young girls who are destructive and noisy in their behaviour - these typically turn out to lead to homosexuality in later life.

The issue, then, is not anywhere near as clear as you or I would like it. Some people are very straight - testosterone or oestrogen practically bleeding from their ears - while some are very bisexual, while some are very gay, while some are slightly gay, while some are slightly straight, and so on. Some are utterly asexual. Whatever the causes of the sexuality in humans, people's sexuality is a natural thing - whichever way they swing or the angle of their swinginess.

Secondly, I was rather rubbish at trying to come up with a place where God's character contradicts something in the Bible. I can't remember how the train of conversation ended up in the weather of this particular shit-storm, but I think I got myself a bit muddled. From this, I was able to better lay out my thoughts, and I present them herewith:

There are certain laws in the Bible which are core expressions of who God is - You shall love the Lord your God..., You shall not murder, and so on. If the Holy Spirit were to appear to someone and tell them that these rules were no longer to be followed, it would change God's character - something we know cannot happen. However, there are also other laws which define how we are to live in order to please God at any one time, yet which do not define his character. I gave the example two blogs ago of the food thing - the Holy Spirit tells Peter that certain meats are now back on the menu despite their previous and long-lasting omission, and yet this doesn't ultimately redefine who God must be.

I feel that it is perfectly possible for God and the church to welcome, love, support and respect homosexual life-partners (or married couples, or whatever you call them) - i.e. for the rules to be changed by the Holy Spirit, which I feel He is calling us to do - without changing who God is defined as (love). I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. So ha.

*_{There are many references and sources in the Biology and Sexual Orientation article on Wikipedia.}

28 - Marriage (the story so far...)

2008-10-01T13:40:00.004+01:00

I sort of promised that I'd write this one. Not to my wife, bless her, who rules the vast proportion of my life with a golden rod (not iron - it's softer and far more expensive than that...). No, to my mate, Leigh, who was my best man when I got married back in May. He's a hotshot lawyer or solicitor-type person now, working in Central London, and he don't take no shit from nobody, foo'.

Leigh expressed some surprised that as of yet I haven't written about one of the most important things to have happened in my life: my wedding and subsequent marriage. So here it is. I've tried to assemble some thoughts on what it's like being married. I'm not an expert (only ~~five~~ six months now), but there are some interesting things about it which I can point out. As a little disclaimer, it should be noted that while I don't typically mince my words in this little interwebby prison of writings, my wife might actually read this, so I may have to, in certain places, be slightly more, erm, discreet than usual.

It's really, really good to be married. When I think about the six and a half years of being with my then-not-yet-wife, Christabel, and not being married, I think of it as being considerably harder and more painful than the ~~five~~ six months since the wedding. Christabel and I met while I was at uni in Loughborough, in December 2001. Christabel used to live at her parents' place in Chessington, Surrey, a journey of about 135 miles each way. Before I learnt to drive, I'd get the train down the Midland Mainline (or Christabel would come the other way), and we'd typically have Friday night through to Sunday afternoon together before parting ways, with a journey of four hours door-to-door. After learning to drive, in June 2006, it obviously got rather easier to get to and fro, but the pain lay in being forcibly separated again, even though we knew we should be together.

Our relationship was always long-distance before the wedding, and we used to worry about whether or not the jump from long to short-distance would be stupidly hard. To be honest, it wasn't, really. We've obviously had our little "exchanges" now and again: for instance, I didn't realise how vital it was that the window is opened in the morning to "air the room" whilst concurrently the heating is put on because "it's cold". Or that the bath-mat is placed neatly over the side of the bath after a shower. Or that if, for reasons beyond my control, breathing through my mouth or breathing through my nose both make too much noise whilst sleeping, I am expected to find a novel and instant way to get air into my lungs. Tracheotomy, for instance. And despite a promise to myself that I would never allow the old toilet-seat argument into my house, I'm afraid that it has reared its ugly head, as apparently it's unreasonable to expect her to "stare" at stale urine on the rim of the toilet while she brushes her teeth. As a result of these things, a "What Christabel Wants" list has been produced, so I can try to understand better what her previously unspoken, psychically-transmitted expectations were. A "What Sam Wants" list has sadly, thus far, remained unforthcoming.

All these things are incredibly minor, however, and I think add a lot of colour and richness to life. I actually sort of enjoy them, in a weird way, and are just an expression of a single level of the multi-storey relationship I have with my wife, that of housemates. And, purely as a housemate, I haven't lived with anyone I get on with better. We don't just live separate lives and then sleep in the same bed - we are always planning and doing things together. We sort out our differences and move on.

The other levels are varied. There's the will for us both to keep certain aspects of our lives as individuals - work life, for instance - separated, in a way. I will always try to ask her about my day, and I'll hear about all the people in her office and the nitty-gritty details of who said what to whom, who is crap and how someone bollocksed up an order for something. But I don't really have much idea of what she does. She'll ask me about my day. Typically I'll respond with a ten-second response indicating that very little has occurred, no one has said anything to anyone of interest, and unless the gasholder in Kennington explodes, there's very little to say. Nothing to report. The PhD then? Meh... still doing it. Going well. Met my deadline. Great. Nothing to report.

There's obviously another level that married couples have... which I'm not going to tell you about.

There's the spiritual level, which we fortunately are at a similar level on, where we both love God, submit to Him and try to live our lives in as loving and decent and hospitable a way as possible. There are many couples in the world who are imbalanced on a spiritual level, and I think it makes a chasm of difference. Whether you both start on one end of the scale or the other, it's important to be in the same place, and have the same desire to move on.

We do a vast amount of things together (and are frequently mocked for the "old-fashioned" nature of some of them), for instance joining the National Trust (which I recommend everyone do), our love of food and cooking, watching certain TV shows together and going on little adventures, to name but a few.

The best level of all, though, is the feeling of utter security and love, the feeling of having a partner to share everything with. Of knowing that someone else feels the same weird, complex, amazing, incomprehensible way about you that you do about them, and that they look forward to seeing you, that they miss you and love you in the same way, and that they understand you better than anyone else ever could. There is an amazing sense of strength through unity, and of growth, and freedom. Yes, freedom - not a word typically (from the male perspective) associated with marriage, but for me, being married has freed me up to do more things than I ever could before - I now have someone to do them with, to back me up and help me, or to support me if I do them by myself.

It's not often that you hear a bloke being honest about how good marriage has been for him - the usual British thing is to make a half-hearted joke about "'er indoors" or "t' ball and chain", and express their love thrice a year in birthday, mother's day and anniversary cards. Believe me, though: marriage is a good thing, and if you find someone who you think could make you happy for the rest of your life, you should do it.

27 - Time to up the offence...

2008-09-18T13:10:00.005+01:00

I've deleted this post because I don't think it's really that fair...

26, Part 2 - Gay-l force winds

2008-09-12T17:20:00.009+01:00

I've just had a quick look at my friend Amanda's new blog, which reminded me that I really should follow up what I wrote about homosexuality that previous time. I have some other, less intense, things to write about once this whole massive rant has elapsed. It really has been a frightfully long time since my previous attempt to convey my thoughts on the tricky issue of homosexuality in Christianity, and for that I apologise. I will probably have further reasons to apologise before this particular post is finished, but there we go.

Onwards, then. How do we reconcile the issue of gay people and Christianity? To help, I've decided to try to make some statements of fact (at least combinations of fact and accepted belief within Christian theology) to begin with:

First, there is a 'scale' of sexuality. Some people are very straight, some are very gay, some are somewhere in between. In this post, 'gay' or 'homosexual' specifically refers to those who are physically incapable of being sexually attracted to the opposite sex, rather than bisexuals who have a choice either way.
If we believe that God made the world and the human race, then we must believe that someone's natural state is the way God made them. The logical conclusion of this is that if God is our Creator, He creates gay people.
Our understanding of homosexual tendency is vastly increased compared to previous times, particular Biblical times.
Many of the interpretations of words in the Bible are ever-so-slightly misleading. For instance, in the passage of 1 Corinthians 6:9, the word 'homosexuality' as translated in the NIV is actually, according to the New King James Version a phrase referring to the Sodomites and the catamites, or paederasts. Forced homosexuality, basically.

Touchy subject, this. Ask anyone what they think about homosexuality, and they trot out the same old passages from the Bible. But let me ask you something: which is more important to Christians - the Bible, or the Holy Spirit? This may sound like a stupid question ("They are both equally important..."), but really: think about it. Take the apostles' creed, for instance:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. AMEN

We say this almost every week in a hell of a lot of Church of England venues around the country, and many other denominations besides. There's a big mention there of the Holy Spirit, but where's the mention of the Bible? There isn't one. Hmmm. Similarly, have a look at the Big Commandment: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength." Well, the Holy Spirit is a big part of God (33.3%, in fact), so substitute the words "Holy Spirit" for "LORD your God" and you'll see how important the Holy Spirit is.

There is, from Jesus, clear support for the Law, and Scripture. However, Jesus stated that the only unforgivable sin is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, which surely puts the Holy Spirit into a clear position of authority compared to a book which is God-inspired, but written through human hand and human mind, and therefore subject to human error.

Because, the problem is, before He went up to heaven, Jesus didn't say:

¹One last thing: here's the Bible - use it well. ²I checked or wrote everything in it, and I promise it's kosher.

When the first Church was forming, they didn't have all of Paul's letters, or Peter's letters, or John's letters. These didn't turn up for at least twenty years or so. They had the Spirit guiding them, and it is through the Spirit that they made their decisions. It was from a Godly vision (check out Acts 10:9-23) that Peter realised that all the animals which were previously prohibited to eat, were actually fine, because God had made them.

To really force my point home, consider Leviticus Chapter 11. It goes on and on and on about what is clean and what is unclean to eat, giving several examples either way. The camel - banned. The rabbit - banned. The locust - fine, actually. So is the grasshopper. And fish. But the prawn? Detestable! Fast forward about 1500 years or so, and in that passage I mentioned, God tells Peter "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." Peter and his fellow Christians can now eat camels, rabbits, prawns, and all the other non-kosher creatures of the culinary rainbow. God has spoken. So be it, etc.

My point is this:

God stays the same throughout the ages. But the rules He expects us to keep change.

There is no other possible conclusion to reach from the comparison of Leviticus 11 and Acts 10:9-23. The Holy Spirit changes the set-up. Things are different now. In fact, to blatantly steal from a rather excellent book I'm reading at the moment, The Bible for Sinners by Christopher Rowland and Jonathan Roberts, consider the following story, which they themselves nicked from a guy called Tom Wright:

Imagine that a Shakespeare play exists whose fifth (and final) act has been lost. A group of sensitive and experienced Shakespearean actors immerse themselves in the first four acts and then have to work out a fifth act for themselves in the light of all that they know about the play and about Shakespeare's work. In this scenario, Wright says, the first four acts have clear authority for the task in hand, but it is an 'authority' that requires consistency and innovation rather than unthinking repetition of the earlier parts of the play. For the drama to work, there must be development and something new in the fifth act. In his Biblical analogy, Wright suggests that the first four acts correlate to Creation, the Fall, Israel and Jesus, with the New Testament forming the first scene in the fifth act. The analogy is useful, he suggests, because the Church lives under the authority of the existing story which cannot be supplanted or supplemented, and yet, 'Our task is to discover, through the Spirit and prayer, the appropriate ways of improvising the script between the foundation events and charter on the one hand and the complete coming of the Kingdom on the other.'

I find this enormously helpful. We have to stop mindlessly trying to recreate "what the Bible says" in some vain attempt to do what we think God wants. We have to, instead, look to the Holy Spirit to guide us through this life. He should be the one to whom we turn when we are stuck, not Genesis or Leviticus or Corinthians. God is more helpful than Moses or Paul. And if you really must turn to a passage in the Bible for help, always, always, always start with the Gospels, and think how Jesus, the guy who said that it was OK for his disciples to eat grain on the Sabbath and that it was OK to heal on the Sabbath and that it was OK to mix with the scummy people that the Holy Ones amongst them wouldn't even approach, would have dealt with the issue.

And it is this which leads me to my main point. If we wanted, we could go to the Bible and recite The Rules which were asked of civilisations 2000-4000 years ago. The thing is, the rules change. God is allowed to change his mind. And most Christians in the Western world really need to start pulling their Bibles out from up their arseholes and actually start connecting with God, to find out what He really wants. Does He want us to force homosexual people to live lives denying a core part of what He created them to be, or does He want us to stop fucking about and actually get on with the job of loving these people and providing for them some real Godly goals for their lives?

For instance, why don't we require of gay people the same sexual rules as straight people, such as no promiscuity, and either celibacy and life dedicated to God, or sex within the confines of a committed, lifelong relationship? Sex outside these confines is either adultery or (if you believe in it) fornication. What we, as a Church, should be doing, is to offer these things as goals for gays to reach. If you're gay, come on in! God loves you. We love you. And we all love you just as you are. Church should be a massive love-up, not some judge-fest. Let gay people "marry", or, if the use of that word in that context offends you, commit to each other for life. Let us, as a Church, support their union and allow them to be a central part of our community. If you actually turn your mind that way, you'll see it's really quite compatible with what Jesus what harping on about all that time ago.

And that is why I really respect people like Gene Robinson for his crusade against judgement, injustice and intolerance wrapped up as Doctrine, with utter ignorance for what the Spirit tells us. I have a lot of respect for warriors like him, and I wish him well. I love him to bits. Just not in that way. I'm not a poof.

26, Part 1 - Homo, 'e wrecked us...

2008-08-04T18:15:00.008+01:00

Or, How Most Christians Are Almost Entirely Wrong About Pretty Much Everything To Do With Homosexuality

Through my old church in Loughborough, I know a girl from Germany called Sigrun who (like me) is also doing a PhD. She's on my friends list on facebook and through the copious notes she writes I found this link. It's about the American Bishop Gene Robinson, who is openly gay and has a bit of a mission: to change the church's view of homosexuality.

I have several issues on which I have not decided how I feel because I simply don't know what God thinks about them, or what the Right Thing To Think is. This list of topics includes most of the current "hot" issues in ethics and Christianity: abortion, GM foods, and so on. Hopefully I will never end up in the position where I have to deal with any of them, but refusing to make up my mind until I begin to experience them myself at least has some benefits, such as being in the great position of not being able to pass judgment on anyone who has issues relating to them. Until very recently, this list also included homosexuality, the issue which is, at the present moment, threatening either to tear the Church of England apart, or alternately to remove another bit of the infinitessimal relevance that the CofE has in today's British society.

I have now made up my mind. Over the course of a two-part blog, I aim to show the decision that I've come to, and how I got there. If you're wondering, it became two-part because I didn't realise when I started how effing huge this topic was going to be, but there are a hell of a lot of issues to cover and, to be honest, I don't credit many people with the longevity and perseverance to read it all in one go.

This issue has lain largely dormant in my mind for a long time now, but recently my wife and I watched a documentary by John Barrowman (the star of Torchwood amongst other things) called The Making of Me. For those who hadn't managed to figure it out, JB is gay. Hugely, flamboyantly gay. He is also a wonderful actor, comes across as an intelligent, funny, warm man and someone who is in a loving, committed relationship with another human being. The programme showed some interesting things: JB is genetically too similar to his brother (as you would expect), and there appears to be no genetic reason why he is gay and his brother is not. There also does not appear, however, to be any environmental reason why he is gay either - his childhood was filled with toys and playing behaviour which would typically be thought of as girlish, but it was a natural choice for John - he wanted to play with those toys from the earliest of ages. His dad seemed to admit that, at first, he struggled a bit with finding out that John was gay, so it is doubtful that he would have forced that issue upon him. Besides, like I said, John has a brother who (presumably) went through the same upbringing and is decidedly not gay.

The documentary showed a pair of twins in the States, around eight to ten years old, with a mother who, by her own admission, is not a girly woman. She never wears skirts or make-up, had short hair, a fairly deepish voice and could not be described as fashionable, or caring about it. One of the twins was a typical young boy - he liked action man, sports, rough play and so on. The other twin was also a boy, but atypical - he played with My Little Pony and Barbie. This is a pair of twins, remember, who were in the womb at the same time and, again, have had the same upbringing as each other. They are too young to be making a conscious decision to act girly or boyish. It is just them expressing themselves as they are inside. One will probably turn out to be gay, and the other will probably turn out to be straight.

It seems that one's sexuality is something deep within us, and that it is defined largely in the womb, being affected by the hormones swiming around at the time. I don't know anything about developmental biology so I can't and don't want to go into any details regarding this, but the basic fact is that gay people are gay and straight people are straight and the vast, overwhelming majority have made absolutely no choice to be one or the other. There is, naturally, a scale to these things. Someone can be extemely gay or straight, or somewhere in between - having a mild attraction to the same sex but mostly concerned with the other one, or being utterly bisexual. Regardless, it is inbred. We cannot help it.

This conclusion - that gay people are neither possessed nor choosing to be gay nor confused nor somehow mentally retarded - is something that could not have been reached in the time of Paul or Jesus or Moses or Abraham. Therefore, I would say, any social context behind God's Law in the Bible regarding homosexuality is utterly irrelevant to today's secular, evidence-based society. And the conclusion of innate homo- or heterosexuality is confounding to those who want to believe that God frowns on carpet-munchers and uphill gardeners.

The problem, then, is to match up the idea that a God of love created people (and other animals) who are naturally homosexual. There's that statistic that's bandied around that 10% of all people are homosexual. I don't know if that's true, but even if it isn't, the idea that active homosexuals cannot be active Christians cuts off an absolutely massive proportion of the human population from ever knowing God, not because of choices that they have made, but because of something that is a deep, core part of who they are. I think that this is deeply, horribly wrong, and I think that most Christians are making hurtful, nasty, prejudiced decisions on a group of people that they do not understand, all in the supposed name of Christ - the one guy who, I suspect, might actually be trying to connect with the homosexual community in spite of the horrified attitudes of many of today's Christians.

So what are the basic issues? Well, from Paul, there's 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, which says (in the NIV):

⁹Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders ¹⁰nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

However, this, in the New King James Version says the following:

⁹ Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,[a] nor sodomites, ¹⁰ nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.

which is mostly the same, except for that little '[a]' fella. That is a footnote indicating that "homosexuals" actually refers to "catamites". A catamite is the younger partner in a paederastic relationship, an arrangement which a lot of people could probably understand the church standing up against - these relationships were more to do with social expectation than personal sexuality, and I believe many could understand the church standing up against these types of relationships. Your eye may have been drawn to that "sodomites" word as well. This is usually taken to mean those who participate in (male to male) anal sex, but is that really the crime of the Sodomites? I always took the passage in Genesis 19:4-9 to refer to terrible hospitability and attempted rape, or at the least a massive gayfest in the centre of town - something which would be just as wrong as a massive heterosexual orgy in the centre of town. But maybe I'm wrong, who knows?

There are, of course, other passages denouncing homosexuality - Romans 1:26-27 and Leviticus 18:22. The former refers to men doing "what is shameful", while Leviticus also refers to many many other things (such as not planting your field with two types of seed) which, to be honest, most Christians couldn't give a tuppenny turd about today. Never mind that people gossip about each other, whisper and conspire and judge behind each others' backs, or that rejection of and contempt for the poor and lonely and unkempt is rife - the clear message from most of the Church is that what is important is what people stick up their bottoms in their private homes.

What is the reality? Does a committed, loving, sexual relationship between two men or two women conducted as decently as that between an honourable man and woman truly compare to an out-and-out public homo-orgy involving the rape of two angels? Is it the same thing as society compelling a teenage boy to have a sexual relationship with a much older man? Is this existence really, in this day and age, a shameful thing?

If one starts to compare between the Christian reaction to many of the lifestyles of heterosexuals and those of homosexuals, should there be any difference? Christianity spends a frankly ridiculous proportion of its time focusing on telling people about what is ok to do with their essentials: You can't put That There unless you've asked God first. You can only ask once, until the other person is dead. You certainly can't think about putting That There, and you're definitely not allowed to let Mrs Palm and her five lovely daughters make the slow trip down to Naughtyland. The basic rule seems to be - nothing is allowed until you're married. Nothing. No hanky-panky or spanky-panky or, indeed, wanky-panky. Don't sleep around. Don't have one-night stands. Have some respect for yourself. Then get married and only ever have sex (missionary position only, remember!) if the main objective is to have babies.

Society still sees one-night stands, orgies, sexual promiscuity and so on as A Bad Thing. And I think that's fair enough. But, when you shake off all the grassy soil of the immoral you are still left with the golden shiny nugget of the respectable. And, in this day and age, slowly but surely, committed, lifelong homosexual relationships are becoming acceptable and honourable. Remember, gay people are gay by nature. Why should they have to live in direct contrast to what God made them to be, just because we are only now beginning to understand the natural basis of sexuality?

It is at this point that one needs to point out the problem with the way most people are living their lives as Christians. Their understanding of the Bible is as a book written by God which tells everyone for all time how to live their lives. This is not true. The Bible is a book written by Man with the influence of God which tells specific groups and tribes in a specific time what to do and what not to do. Some of this applies to us in different groups and different times. Some of it does not. We are not supposed to be living by the Law, with the occasional influence of the Spirit. We are supposed to be living by the Spirit, under which we follow the Law. Have a read of Galatians 3 if you don't believe me. Stop trying to live by the law. Start trying to live by the spirit. Morality is not Christianity. Legalism is not Spiritualism.

Paul's rant about sexual immorality (a big problem for the Corinthians, who had to put up with there being a Temple to Aphrodite in the city, in which priestesses would fornicate for cash as worship to the Goddess of Love) was meant for the Corinthians. He focuses on it for a reason. The hedonism of that city was notorious, and he wants the Church there to remain detached from it. But in the midst of this rant, consider this (1 Corinthians 6:12-14, NKJV):

¹² All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. ¹³ Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. ¹⁴ And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.

Who is to say what is helpful to the Christian and what is not? Who decides what is sexually immoral to the Christian? Is it a letter written to a group having to deal with paederasts and prostitutes all over the place? Is it some people whose hatred boils over and whose understanding and commitment to the Law rather than the Spirit is confused and patchy? Or is it a group of loving, Spirit-led people with a true faith and a wisdom surpassing all others?

I believe that in the light of the new understandings of homosexuality, as Christians, we need a sea change in our attitudes to sex and sexuality, and in the second part of this blog, I aim to show in what ways we should do this. Not that anyone will listen to me, mind. I actually don't know why I'm even bothering.

25 - Bashing the Bishop

2008-07-22T11:38:00.006+01:00

Hello there! My name's Angus MacLeay, Rector of St. Nicholas in Sevenoaks, Kent. You might remember me from such opinions as

The view that women bishops are repugnant to the word of God is an accepted position. (Here)

and

(...) we base our views on accepted theology and biblical views that have been held down the centuries. (Here)

I am an utter pillock.

Ignore the fact that the Church isn't really supposed to be washing its dirty laundry in public. The issue here is whether or not our Almighty God who created Heaven and Earth, all the stars that we can see, planets, moons, animals, plants, water, air, rocks, light, sight, emotion, hormones and Belgium, cares more about whether or not his people are spiritually led by women or gays than whether they are spiritually led by the right people. About whether or not the God who called Deborah to be a judge to his people hates women being in charge. About whether or not the God who is all-powerful and all-knowing could change the whole order of human society to put the women in charge if he wanted to. About whether or not God requires humans never to change or adapt or hold different beliefs from the societies of Biblical times.

About whether or not people who feel naturally compelled to put a willy inside them should be allowed to be in charge of those with the willies.

I'm writing about this because it really, really pisses me off that this is getting so much attention and debate. Let's have a look at some of the issues.

In 1992, the Church of England agreed that women could become vicars for the first time in this country. By 1994 they were starting to be ordained and serve their own parishes. Forgive the cynical trait within me that thinks that the numbers of men wishing to become vicars was probably so low that they needed to allow women to become ordained just to keep churches open. Regardless, that was all fine and dandy, and very few people (except some idiots) threatened to go back to the Catholics as a result.

The uproar this time, then, is something much, much different. Why?

Well, I believe it's down to selfishness. You see, back in 1992, the priests and bishops who are now apoplectic were more than happy. "Go ahead," they cried. "Women vicars? Ha ha ha, no problem! _{(Just keep their talons away from me)}." I think the main reason for the change is because the vicars and bishops have realised that this would mean that women could now be in charge of them. They couldn't give a flying fuck if the average man on the street is led by a woman. It's only when it applies to them that it becomes the church event of the year.

I suppose it is a big deal. After all, there could never be a woman in charge of the whole damn thing, could there? Yep, that's right - the Queen is the Head of the Church of England! A woman! Dear God, run for the hills everyone! The whole thing is screwed!

Another thing. The Church comes from a time when women were very much second-class citizens. They didn't have a say. Is it not just inside the realm of the possible that a series of letters, written by a man who never married and living in a time when women were there to look pretty and have babies might contain the teensy-veensiest bit of bias against women? Why are we still trying to conform to those rules? Don't they remember that God could raise up an army of followers from the rocks if he wanted? So what's the big deal about women? Let me say something to everyone who is still teetering on the brink of being sexist or homophobic about this:

We now live in a society which has got certain principles which are held up as being immutable. Women deserve the same rights as men. Gays deserve the same rights as straights. Even if one set is often naturally less capable of fulfilling a task than the other, their correctness for a role should be based on individual ability, not on overall categorisation. This society is vastly different from that in which Jesus and Paul lived. The church needs to remain relevant to our society, not theirs. Stop living in the past and realise that women's and gay rights are not something to be afraid of. They are something that the church should be championing, taking a lead in, being a shining light to the world about. We should welcome everyone to our community, regardless of wealth or health or looks or background. We should forgive, we should be compassionate, we should be wise, but most of all we should love. And for the love of God we should stop giving a monkey's toss about whether or not someone likes the feel of a stiff hard cock in their nether regions and start caring more about the billions of poor or homeless or rejected or molested or afflicted or tortured or oppressed. Once the world is perfect, let's have a chat about it then.

So if these muppets want to leave the church, let them. Let them fade into the background and become the grey nothingness that the public ignores. Let them fail to do their Christian duty, to realise what God really wants. Let them become pointless, useless figures who have no relevance to our culture. Let their views become something of the past, a relic of a bygone era to which we no longer conform. Let them become despised outcasts who are seen for their hatred and bile, who are compared with Christ as black is compared with white. And let the Church stop holding itself back, and grow to become again something which people respect and uphold, even if they themselves do not hold the same views. Let it be the shining light that Jesus wanted, and stop living in the dark.

24 - How to Hatch a Thatcher Dispatcher

2008-07-14T13:10:00.006+01:00

There are rumours abounding on teh intertubes concerning a certain Baroness Margaret Thatcher and whether or not she is to receive a State Funeral.

To give a bit of background, a state funeral is an honour given to a member of a country who is regarded as being of considerable importance and significance in a country's history. But they have to have been, at least in the minds of the population of that country, a "good" person, or someone who at least did a great deal of "good" for their country. For instance, Nelson got a state funeral. Hitler did not. Both are still of considerable importance in their respective countries. Now, I'm not really someone who can validly claim to have a strong opinion on the crazy old milk-stealing, country-wrecking crone, because I was born four years into her tyranny and was only seven when she fecked off. I still have an opinion about her, however, because I'm legally allowed one; and as a result of growing up in Lancashire was probably always going to tend towards the crowd who would rather see her knees hacked off with a pick-axe and her wrinkled corpse buried in a disused coal mine and covered in benefit cheques than parading down Whitehall on a gun-carriage while the Queen bows to her Majesty. But that's just me.

But the real problem is, when Churchill got his state funeral back in 1965, most people agreed that he had achieved something incredible for the UK. Getting a country fresh out of WWI and the Great Depression to come through the Second World War, albeit bedraggled and in need of a bloody good bath, and inspiring its citizens to pull together for such a sacrificial cause was an immense achievement. Wellington's mastery of land warfare and Nelson's achievements at sea were similarly deserving of such an honour. Few, I think, would contest those points.

But Margaret Thatcher? While I personally may believe her to be so evil she can probably rotate her head like an owl and levitate, there are others who want to sing her praises from the rooftops. A helluva lot of these people seem to come from the States (they're welcome to her if they like her so much), while there are those few from the UK who are delighted with this announcement (if announcement this is, and not merely idle speculation).

Thatcher made us an economic power again, they claim. She stood up to the Argentines, she stopped the stanglehold that the unions had, etc., etc. Socialists counter with the issues of Poll Tax, milk stealing, shutting down the mines, 3 million unemployed, and so on. It's an old debate and it will probably never go away. I don't know anything about either argument because I wasn't able to properly experience it understand it at the time, being, as I was, more interested in pretending to be in the Army and singing amusing songs about suspicious yobbo behaviour ("accidentally" fall, my arse).

Regardless of the truth of the claims on either side, the truth is that Thatcher is a hugely divisive figure - massively popular in huge swathes of the country, but just as largely hated across other broad bands of the UK. To give her a State Funeral, in my opinion, is a mistake of epic proportions. To give her that honour because she was the first woman Prime Minister (whoopee-doo) is effectively rewarding her for being born with a vagina. Yes, she helped to make Britain rich again, but at the short-term cost of creating massive poverty amongst those already struggling and at the long-term cost of wrecking the culture and community of our nation. Is that worth a State Funeral? Does someone who is so regularly derided really deserve that honour? I think not - it's just far too controversial.

But, regardless of whether or not these rumours are true, the main point is that, eventually, she will have a funeral. The street parties can begin, and the large queues for hundreds of thousands of Britons to spit on her body and dance on her grave can be formed. If it's a State Funeral, we might just get the day off work to really put the effort in.

23 - A Few Things I Hate

2008-06-17T19:24:00.004+01:00

I would like to apologise in advance for the potty language that's about to spew from my fingers. Actually, f*** it. This is an anger post. If you are of the typical disposition where swearies make you turn blue, go and look at a fluffy bunny or something.

1. BEATBOXING

This has got to be, without question, the most idiot, stupid, irritating, pointless thing that has ever befallen my ears. And I've heard S Club. People who in all other respects are complete musical failures decide that the best thing they can do with their mouths is to make vague drumming sounds. You're not big. You're not clever. You don't sound good. You don't look good. You aren't talented. You're not entertaining. No one takes you seriously. Most people hate it. Read. My. Blog:

BEATBOXING IS SHIT. STOP IT. ALL OF YOU. NOW.

Thank you.

2. CHAVS WHO USE THEIR MOBILE PHONES AS A PUBLIC-SERVICE BROADCASTER

You're young. You want to listen to the latest shit-hop single from Fiddy or whoever. But you're on the bus. Weeeeellll... fuck it, you don't have any respect for anyone else, do you? You couldn't give a shit if everyone else on the bus or the train would rather turn their 4 year-old over to a pack of rabid paedos than listen to your inane drum 'n' bass "anthems". You want to listen to it, and that's all that matters.
Problem is, if we all took that attitude, then I would be more than happy to attach you to the bus's hot engine, dangling onto the road, using just your head and some gaffer tape. With all your friends struggling to keep hold of a rope that I cunningly attached to your genitals. I'd probably get assisted, too. But I control myself. Good thing, that.

3. PEOPLE WHO DRIVE TOO SLOWLY

I can't help it. Nothing makes me get angry when I'm in a car quite as much as someone who seems to be driving 20mph below the speed limit, either because they are "scared", or they weren't paying attention and missed the National Speed Limit sign. People who don't realise that the NSL on a dual carriageway is actually 70mph for cars, not 60. I don't mind too much those who are clearly having trouble with their car, or who fancy moving over to the left-hand lane to take things easy for a while, or even those on high-streets who are looking for a particular shop. It's those who seem to have no reason whatsoever for driving so slowly. Holding me up because they're an idiot. If I can drive at those speeds in a fucking Metro, you can do it in your 4x4, which has got much better tyres than me.

And I've noticed that these people (who prefer 40mph in a 60 zone) don't then reduce that speed in a 30 zone. They've chosen their speed and they're sticking to it, regardless of the location. If you can't cope with the higher speeds, you shouldn't be driving at all. Get off my road.

4. MOST AUDI DRIVERS

...not all, but most of them. Because most of them are utter pricks on the road. I don't know if it's the inferiority complex of not quite being a Mercedes or a BMW driver, or if you have a secret belief that Audi drivers actually have that something special over the others, and thus attempt to drive like you think Schumacher does, but what you do on the road is nothing short of Satanic. If someone else is overtaking in the outside lane slower than you, tail-gating them and flashing your lights is not a demonstration of good driving. Neither is refusing to stop at zebra crossings. Or just making it through the amber light. Or putting your fogs on when driving on a motorway on a clear night.
If you drive an Audi, the chances are very high that you're a complete idiot with a small penis and an impending divorce. Get a Ferrari, and hang with the big boys.

22 - Let's play a game

2008-05-27T09:01:00.004+01:00

You know the deal. You're at work. Most of the internet is blocked off when you're at work. Facebook is inaccessible, YouTube is off-limits and even Pathetic Motorways can't be clicked on.

But Wikipedia... ah, Wikipedia, my old friend. How you've guided me through hours, days, weeks of procrastination and helped me to learn about things I never even knew existed. Or knew could ever exist. Or wanted to know.

I've made edits, I've read about everything from World War I to Margaret Thatcher to The Importance of Being Earnest, and I've clicked and clicked and clicked. The hyperlinks from one page to another are fantastic, and often lead you down paths far, far away from that which you wanted to progress (work, for one thing).

So, let's play a little game. The idea in this is to go to a random Wikipedia page (if you so desire, there's a Random Article link on the left hand side in the navigation pane). When I clicked, it took me to Buków, which is a town in Poland.

When you have your random page, click on the first hyperlink in the main text, not any italic text which appears above the lead paragraph (for me, this was Poland). Then keep clicking the first hyperlink that links to a proper wikipedia article (i.e. not Wiktionary or Help pages, or any outside website) until you get to a page you've seen before in the chain or you reach a page which has no hyperlinks (this is unlikely, but possible).

For example, the Buków-Poland chain went like this:

Which is where the chain ends. Sadly, this one didn't really turn out as well as I was hoping. All language-based. Let's try another.

...Hang on a minute - this one ends with philosophy too! This one was awesome, covering systems and software, collecting and physics, before ending up back on philosophy again.

In fact, all of the following random articles ended up on the philosophy page:

Hindu Temples in Thrissur Rural, a list of Hindu Temples in Thrissur, a district in India. (17 clicks)
Qadi Yusuf, one of two Middle-Eastern people. (11 clicks)
Victoria: Revolutions, a computer game expansion pack. (27 clicks)
Theerathep Winothai, a Thai football player. (9 clicks)
Nicholas Medforth-Mills, one of the heirs to the now-defunct Romanian throne. (10 clicks)
Stuff (cloth), a type of thickly woven cloth. (17 clicks)
Engaewa similis, a species of crayfish. (20 clicks)
23018 Annmoriarty, a main-belt asteroid discovered in 1999. (11 clicks)
Schleuniger, an international group of companies based in Switzerland. (15 clicks)
Robert Colquhoun, a Scottish painter. (20 clicks)

This finding is, I believe, incredible.

It is also worth noting, that if one does the opposite, and takes the last Wikipedia hyperlink in an article (ignoring any "See also" and reference sections - using the main body text only), then going from Philosophy, one ends up eventually getting to the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season which cycles between itself and the 2004 season.

In summary, then, Chew's law states:

All Wikipedia first links tend towards the Philosophy page

There. Now, get back to work.

P.S. If anyone finds a first-link route which is either fascinating or doesn't end at the Philosophy page, then please post it in the comments page and I shall add your addendum to Chew's law.

21 - "And We'd Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Weren't For Those Pesky Kids..."

2008-05-20T07:44:00.005+01:00

Embryos. Stem-cells. Hybrid. All are scientific words that may well have just got your blood boiling. Another concept which has got people's backs up is conscience voting.

In a rather fence-sitting position, let me start off by stating that on this issue, I have next to no opinion. Yet. I'm going to work through the arguments on both sides of the debate in this blog.

Before I do, let me just bring you up to speed on the dilio. Parliament has just defeated a couple of tabled amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which is going through the Parliamentary stages, and which updates the 1990 laws with respect to scientific advances. One of the striking things about this bill is that it gives validation to research involving hybrid "admixed" embryos, which offer the potential to allow future solutions to issues such as Alzheimer's (which has afflicted our Science Fiction Lord and Master Mr. Terry Pratchett). These are a mixture of human and animal embryos, created outside the womb, to be used for research purposes only. Not a one would be implanted inside a woman, and artifical incubation, while cool for chickens or ducks, is not yet possible for humans. Seems fair enough.

But then enter the moralists. ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ EMBRYO BILL BACKED BY MPS, screams the Express. The Daily Mail was practically incandescent in its apoplexy, yelling "What is certain, however, is that we have overturned millennia of moral thinking and stepped into territory hitherto reserved for science fiction horror stories." The Sun, in a remarkable display of calm, actually offered a fair story on the topic, neither reactionary nor one-sided. But that's possibly because they don't really understand what's going on, and neither do their readers. And, as per usual, the Christians step into the fray, telling all who will listen that this is an outrage, God is watching and weeping, yadda yadda. And, as per usual, it's the crazies on the fringes who grab all the attention.

OK. First, a bit more on the issue. Why use animal tissue at all? Well, it comes down to a shortage of human ova for use. Also, human-animal hybrids produce better results and require less human... bits. They can then produce stem cells, which can be used to create other tissue, and research performed on the tissue. Because it will allow tissue to be created specifically for research, the poor yields from efforts to use actual human organs for research will be negated. It is illegal to implant one of these embryos inside a human, and to bring it term, if indeed it were possible for the embryo to come to term. Any scientific body wanting to perform research in this area must apply to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for permission and each case will be considered on its own merits, with there being no guarantee that permission will be granted.

But wait!, yell many, isn't this tampering with nature? Isn't the fabric of humanity sacred anymore?

Weeelll.... OK. It is tampering with nature, but then, that's not really anything new for humans. Do any of you eat garlic? Well, it might surprise you to discover that garlic is, in fact, not massively natural. It was adapted, by humans, to be a more agriculturally-friendly version of wild garlic. Similarly, the specific breed of chicken that many of us have been eating for a long while, were outed by Jamie Oliver as very purpose-bred fast-growing, large chickens which have a lot of meat. God did not create these massive chickeny beasts at the creation, but humans have adapted what he did create to be something more useful. Any industry which in any way deals with agricultural or living things will usually have taken those plants or animals and adapted them through interbreeding to be more useful to the human race. And these adaptations are allowed to live. This is just a much faster way of providing adapted cells, which have no pain response and do not know they exist.

But is it right to perform experiments on unwilling humans? I suppose that some would think of the horrors of what the Nazis did to those they experimented on, but, again, think: firstly, does this bunch of cells add up to a human yet? If the answer is no, then what's the problem? And if you're not sure, ask yourself what you think it is that makes you a human? Is it your emotions? Your ability to feel pain? Your knowledge of your own existence? The embryos have none of these things.

A massive argument in this comes down to the whole abortion debate. I'm not going to argue about that here because it's been done to death (no pun intended) but, like it or not, abortion is legal in this country. Embryos are allowed to be withdrawn the opportunity to grow. Where you draw the line about where its life begins in the embryonic-foetal process is up to you. But if you are in favour of abortions before a certain point, then I would say that you would struggle to then argue that embryos taken from before that abortion period should not be used for scientific research. If it's not yet a baby, and it's ok to remove its chance of becoming one, then it's ok to use what secrets they may hold to further the health of those of use who are alive.

Note: I am not saying that this is my opinion, but offering a logical extrapolation of being in favour of abortion.

I think that many people simply feel uncomfortable with the idea of using these cells for research. Some perhaps really do picture Frankenstein or some other science fiction horror story. Be cool. None of these bunches of cells will ever amount to a real animal. They would not be able to survive outside lab conditions and will not be used for anything other than their created purpose. But I do have a lot of sympathy for those whose uncomfortability with researching on this tissue leads them to oppose this view. It's important that we do not allow the pursuit of noble goals to lead us down unethical paths. The ends do not justify the means, at any time.

Another thing is for those who do not agree with the research is to imagine that at some point in the future you or your child are afflicted with a fatal or deeply debilitating condition which is treatable, but only because of research in this area. Would you refuse the treatment because of the way in which it had been discovered? Going back to the Nazis, their repugnant and horrific experiments have prompted a debate, explored here and here, into whether or not the results of these experiments should be used to further scientific advances today, given the nature of their collection. Given that the experiments have been performed and the data have been collected, should the results be struck off because of their blood-soaked collection?

And, finally, just to anticipate a particular type of response: at no point does the Bible say anything specifically about human-animal hybrid embryonic research or stem-cells. If you honestly believe God thinks a certain way, and you want to go along with that, then that's fine. But please don't point to the Bible as your back-up, unless it is directly relevant and not something taken massively out of context.

So there. What's your position? I would probably now say that mine is a tentative support, which could waver towards opposition in the near future, depending on the direction of the research.

20 - Teh stupid, it burns.

2008-05-15T11:52:00.008+01:00

There is a hits album by Elvis Presley called "50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong". This statement has been adapted many times and is a classic statement used to indicate that the sheer quantity of people who believe something or behave in a certain way suggests that that something may be true or that way of behaving is acceptable.

This is, of course, utter crap.

Of course 50,000,000 Elvis fans can be wrong. Almost everyone is wrong on almost all subjects almost all of the time.

In fact, the premise that because loads of people do something, that makes it okay, is what is known as an appeal to authority, which is a type of logical fallacy.

I therefore present here a guide to some of the more stupid things that people do en masse which really get on my tits:

1. Auld Lang Syne

This is a song, sung at the dawning of the New Year, to celebrate those things that have passed. It means "Old Time's Sake", and comes from Scotland, where they love to celebrate the New Year, usually because the previous one has been pretty shocking. The Scots sing,

We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

In England, and throughout the English-speaking world, however, massive crowds of people gather in places like Times Square or Trafalgar Square, in a spirit of love and harmony and alcohol, joining arms together cross-wise, and sing the line,

We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For the sake of auld lang syne...

...which is interesting, as this means that massive groups are singing "for the sake of old time's sake". Which is stupid. Beyond measure.

The stupid does not end here, however. There is something very similar called "RAS Syndrome", or "Redundant Acronym Syndrome" Syndrome. It describes incidents where people use an acronym and then add the last word abbreviated by the acronym onto the end. Like "PIN Number" [PIN=Personal Identification Number], or "PAT Testing" [PAT=Portable Appliance Testing]. Or "AC Current". Or "Please RSVP" (Please respond, please).

You get the point.

2. Following the person in front

I think we've all been guilty of this one at some point. I'll regale you with a story as an example.

It was a warm midsummer night some years ago, approaching the midnight hour. My brother and I had been chatting and laughing over a beer, when I got a bit peckish. After scouring the cupboards, I found that, sadly, they were bare. Naturally, this caused us some consternation.

Luckily, the ASDA down the road had just turned 24 hour, so I was able to rock down there and grab a bit of food and more beer. But when I arrived, there was a massive queue going out of the door. Not thinking properly, I joined it. It was at least a few minutes before I had the bright idea of asking the person in front what the hell we were all queuing for. It turned out that the new Harry Potter book was getting released at precisely 12:01 am, and the parents of these kids (some of whom were actually in the queue at this time) were queuing up to buy the book.

My point here is not about this strange parenting behaviour, but about my (and your) tendency to simply join queues, follow people if they're all doing the same thing, join in, not want to be left out, keep up with the Joneses, jump on the bandwagon. It's what drives fashion and much of our commercial culture.

We are not people, we are sheeple.

3. Pressing Buttons on Pelican Crossings

This is a hilarious one. I saw an example of this just yesterday. Let me make something clear to you all:

PRESSING THE BUTTON AT A PELICAN CROSSING MORE THAN ONCE DOES NOTHING.

THE GREEN MAN IS NOT SYMPATHETIC TO YOUR IMPATIENCE.

Do you really, truly, believe that the light saying "WAIT" comes on just to piss you off? Or that it only turns the traffic lights red if you press it a certain number of times per second? Or that "WAIT" is actually irony? I promise you that if you just wait without touching the button, then the green man will still guide you safely across, in time. Just have faith. I know it's difficult, but you've got to trust me.

The same thing goes for lifts. Do you really believe that, when you press the button and the little red LED surrounding to it lights up, but the doors don't open straight away, that an electronic control system is actually ignoring you? Again, let me point out something:

There may well be people in the lift already. They would prefer NOT to travel downwards faster than the speed of sound if they can help it.

I suppose this reaction is one of reassurance. Am I important to this unconscious piece of metal and components? Do I matter? Will I be able to get back to my hotel room in the next thirty seconds?

It's okay. Just be cool. You'll get there.

4. Small pools of water in interesting places

We've all seen them.

There's a pool of water in Iceland where the mid-Atlantic ridge passes through the country, with a bridge over it.

Or there's a commemorative well in a popular Oxfordshire town to a saint or a hero or a local important event.

Or there's a cave in the Mendips with a stream running through it.

Or there's a spring in the Derbyshire Pennines marking the starting-point for an important river.

Wherever these small pools of water in interesting places exist, mankind will always, always, be unable to resist the overwhelming thought that this just might be, actually, no really, a wishing well. And thus a large population of the world spends far too much time staring at bits of water before the brain cells get together and decide that the best response in this situation is to fish around in the pocket, grab a penny or tuppence, and throw it in. If the pool fairies are lucky, they might even get a pound.

And so when someone who actually likes the look of these things and isn't merely after trying to buy some luck turns up, they're faced with a pool of water dotted with corroded copper coins. It's not tourism or "indulging the children". It's just littering.

There are very few wishing wells in the world. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the last time there was an active wishing well on our Earth was when Merlin and his magical mound of musical monkeys were moseying around. That is, NEVER.

I mean, for heaven's sake, think to yourself: by what power or mystic being will the donation of 3p lead to me getting laid / rained on by chocolate / getting rich / my broken arm magically healing?

Don't forget: God is Jewish. The fairies have gone into hiding. The water-nymphs probably aren't interested in your cash.

It's gonna take a hell of a lot more than that.

Very Quickly...

2008-05-01T23:34:00.002+01:00

For anyone who likes to grab the views of the rabid, racist, BNP-voting, gun-toting, Labour-hating lovable old fiends on the BBC's Have Your Say, there is (at long, long last) a blog dedicated to highlighting the more... interesting points made. It's called spEak You're bRanes, and there's now a link to it in the Blogs I Like on the right-hand-side. Clicky.

19 - Thoughts of a Passing Bachelor

2008-04-28T10:13:00.003+01:00

I have just been to the Prep weekend for Lee Abbey Camp, which is a time for the leaders to begin to prepare everything for the two amazing weeks on that small field in North Devon. It is also a fantastic time for people who have often not seen each other for around eight or nine months to meet back together, spend some time chatting and enjoying each other's company.

I am getting married on Sunday, and many of my friends whom I have met through LA Camp were there, and often asked the question, "So, are you excited then?!" Both me and Christabel are fairly honest people, and to be honest, our response had to be either a shrug and a "meh", or a feigned excitement. I did spend some time trying to muster up some excitement about the event, but the loss of my mp3 player with all my recent work on it and Manchester United losing to Chelsea kind of put a dampener on everything.

I am excited about the wedding, sort of, just probably not as much as some of those who are coming to witness it. I'm sure that come Friday and Saturday, we will be bouncing off the walls, but there are still things to be organised, things to be paid for and collected, and at the moment it feels a bit like getting excited about the imminent completion of a Lego model. A Lego model that's taken nearly three years to complete.

Christabel and I have been together now for just under six and a half years. That's quite a long time. The Beatles only released records for eight years, and look at what they produced. When Christabel and I got together, 11/9 was still a very raw scar on America's national conscience, but Iraq had not yet been invaded. The Earthquake in Bam, Iran, had not yet killed 28,000 people, and the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean had not yet killed 225,000. (Isn't it weird how we define our time in terms of these international incidents, which usually involve massive humanitarian crises?)

The point is, over that time, Christabel and I have got used to each other's quirks and foibles. Although we haven't lived together yet(won't that be fun?!), we do know each other really rather well and the thought of being married to her doesn't seem, to me, to be much of a change at this point in time. I'm probably wrong. We'll see.

And then there's the point that I'm still at work and I don't finish until Friday. When your normal life is still on-going (wake up, make breakfast, watch breakfast TV, go to work, work, go home from work, make tea, eat tea, watch evening TV, go to bed), it's a bit difficult to get thrilled about other things. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I'm definitely looking forward to the honeymoon and what goes on on the honeymoon (I don't have to spell it out), and the food that we'll have at the reception will be great, I'm sure. Most of the bits are now organised, most of them are paid for and most have been collected/delivered. I think when I'm getting dressed into that outfit at Sunday lunchtime I'll probably start to feel rather nervous and a bit out of my depth. But not right now.

I think a big reason for the feeling of apathy is that I simply haven't got my head around the enormity of marriage. Maybe I won't for a while, as I have no direct experience of what it is, what it's like and how to do it. I get these odd snippets of thoughts running through my head every now and again, such as the point when we start having kids, or being old together and looking back on these years and thinking about everything that we've done. Because, compared to fifty years of marriage, six and a half years of a relationship is not a long time.

But the main reason for feeling calm is that I know that this is what God wants. It links into my personal views on divorce, which are rather different, I suspect, to most people's views. I don't have a problem with divorce, personally. I think its legality is fine and it is acceptable for Christians to do it, whilst obviously it is incredibly sad. Because the point is, when one gets married, one is either doing it in accordance with God's wishes or against God's wishes. If it is against them, then you'll be lucky to make the marriage work, and perhaps less happy than those in the other camp. If the marriage ends in divorce because of this, the sin occurred when the two got married, not when they get divorced.

If the marriage is in accordance with God's wishes, then the people are "right" for each other, but if it reaches the point of divorce being necessary then the couple (or maybe one of the couple) have sinned by not investing the time, being loving enough, or disciplining themselves enough to make the marriage work. The divorce is not a sin, but is the result of a multitude of sins. Even at that point, forgiveness and effort can still make a marriage work, but if the wife has for years been the subject of beatings, how can one condemn her for wanting to escape that and find happiness with someone who will love her better?

I strongly believe, and have done since I first fell in love with Christabel back in February 2002, that she is "The One". I believe that God wants us to be married, that he smiles down upon us and has given each to the other to fulfil some greater purpose. I am under no illusion that the rest of my life will be easy, and am prepared to put in the hard work to make everything what it should be. But the very fact that this is the fruition of something Godly makes me rather relaxed, and prepared to take whatever comes along.

Actually, thinking about it, I am getting rather excited now...

18 - Should Christianity have flexible ethics?

2008-04-17T11:50:00.009+01:00

As Christians, we think that it would be just swell if others could come to believe what we believe. The fact that a lot of people - often militant atheists - have a big problem with this is another argument for another day. We would like a world where faith in Christ comes as standard. This cannot happen if the Church is seen as an unattractive thing to be part of, if Christians are seen as weak or out of touch. However, the fact is Christianity has a massive image problem, particularly in Western Europe.

This problem is exacerbated when one hears stories in the news about Catholic bishops making stupid comments about homosexuals or the whole Rowan Williams/Sharia law debacle. Present issues such as restrictions on women being allowed to become priests or bishops in certain Christian denominations or the Catholic church banning its members from using contraception, added to historical issues such as the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition create rather negative images of the Church in people's minds. Christianity is (or rather attempts to be) a model to society reflecting a good, holy and righteous way to live, bringing happiness to its members. But should this model stay rigid over millenia? Especially in a society which has modernised so ridiculously quickly over even the last ten/twenty/fifty years?

This problem was phrased excellently by the vicar of my old Church, Emmanuel in Loughborough, when talking in an Alpha Course Q&A about the Church's ability to modernise: "The Church of England tends to move at the pace of its slowest members." I believe that this statement can be applied to most areas of the Christian Fellowship. This is a tricky topic to try to cover, but I want to discuss the issues around why the Church tends to be held back when it comes to modernising, rather than focusing on ways in which it can improve.

Dan Northam-Jones, in an excellent blog, writes about Christianity's view of the Bible, and how many Christians view it as an absolute truth, in which there are no errors, and in which every conceivable concept or moral dilemma can be fathomed, understood, and worked around. This last point is clearly untrue, as one only has to look at so many of the ethical grey areas around (Stem Cell research, GM food, abortion, euthanasia, etc.) to find widely differing views even within the Church itself. People will often attempt to use specific passages of the Bible, which had no intention of ever being associated with the issue at hand, to justify their opinion. Personally, I believe that the Spirit has the answers, but given that this tack is open to so much interpretation and those who would deliberately misrepresent the view of God, it is not always best to rely upon those who claim to be prophets (i.e. those who have a direct word from God). Discernment, a gift of the spirit, is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, this is not always used wisely or at all.

And then we get to Paul. The Church's greatest evangelist has a lot of bandwidth in the New Testament - we know more about his earthly life than we do about Jesus's. His letters to the various peoples of the First Century have given us a lot of wisdom and guidance over the last two thousand years. But Paul was a man of strong opinions, who was in a position of high authority in the Church, and who was not afraid to risk making people angry (Galatians 2):

11When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. 12Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. 13The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.
14When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?

This incident came after Paul had muscled his way into the position of "apostle" (Galatians 2) because of his personal experience with Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). Remember, this is a guy who had many Christians put to death because of their "heresy": one could conclude that he tended towards the more extreme views. (Note, that's not to say that what he wrote was untrue or misguided, but is an assessment of his viewpoint). On the face of it, it is easy to find some of these views:

11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. (1 Corinthians 5)

1Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry. 2But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. 3The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. (1 Corinthians 7)

9I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.
11A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. 13For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. (1 Timothy 2)

5And every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is just as though her head were shaved. (1 Corinthians 11)

These are opinions which, if expressed today, would probably get Paul derided as out of touch and lacking understanding. Women being made to cover their heads flies in the face of every equal rights campaign we have seen in the last hundred years. But look a bit deeper: Corinth was a hotbed (no pun intended) of prostitution and sexual immorality. Priestesses of the Greek Goddess of Love, Aphrodite were effectively prostitutes, accepting money and offering sex as a form of worship to Aphrodite. They were identified by shaving their heads. In no way did Paul want people to associate the young Church in that city with those living there who partook in these things. He wanted women to be respected, rather than vilified. He was advising Christians to appeal to the community by being a model of holiness and happiness, and making visible signs that they were different, that the norm of the worldly society around them need not apply, and that the Church was an attractive "club" to be part of.

Why would anyone want to become part of this club, however, if certain rules were not followed? Women were very much second-class citizens and if the Church was seen to be allowing them to rule over men, then that would not have been acceptable, and people would have been turned away. That is not to say that God himself objects outright to the idea that women can be priests, just that certain behaviours or beliefs by God's people will push others away, rather than drawing them in. Christians tolerating sinful behaviour by one of their members, whilst telling those on the outside to repent would make them look like massive hypocrites. Note that in his next letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 2) Paul states in response to 1 Corinthians 5:

5If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you, to some extent—not to put it too severely. 6The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. 7Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him. 9The reason I wrote you was to see if you would stand the test and be obedient in everything.

Here he states that he was testing the Church there to see if they were obedient, and tells them to be forgiving to those who realise that they have done wrong . This puts rather a different spin on his original comment, does it not? All these passages require context. Context, context, context. Without it, we tend to make fools of ourselves.

I believe that there is a "hierarchy" of beliefs in the Christian Church - different levels with the top being the most vital to the concept of being a Christian, and those at the bottom being the most fiddly, prone to discussion and much less important. The most important belief is also the simplest: Jesus was the son of God, the Christ, and everyone who believes in him will gain eternal life in heaven. Other beliefs on this "level" include the omnipotence of God, the existence of the Holy Spirit, and so on. Those who believe in God will want to follow his commandments, the primary (and summary) one being to Love the Lord Your God... and to Love your Neighbour as Yourself, as well as following the more specific and immutable ones such as Thou Shalt Not Murder. After that there is the authority of the Church for those who commit to it, followed by other issues such as those to do with everyday life as a Christian (views on abortion, etc.).

Paul clearly shows that this bottom rung of the belief ladder can be manipulated, changed and modified based on the culture that is around, without affecting the primary belief in the Messiahness of Jesus. The quote from 1 Corinthians 11 states in the very next verse,

6 (...) if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head. [Emphasis added]

Now, the following verses do go on to give opinions on women with which I do not agree. But that's ok - disagreeing with Paul on one issue does not make me a bad Christian and it does not mean I am disagreeing with God. Paul was not God nor Jesus and implying that after his conversion he was incapable of making (or writing) erroneous comments or decisions implies that he was perfect, which he was clearly not. I have added the emphasis to verse 6 in order to show that the actions and beliefs of the Church on that bottom level of the belief hierarchy can differ: if the society views it as a disgrace for a women to cut off her hair, then she should not cut it and cover her head. If it is ok, then she does not have to worry about it so much. Romans 14 states

1Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. 4Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

What he saying here is that, firstly, vegetarians are weak in faith (kidding!), but secondly that people are allowed to have different opinions; there is not so much clarity in ethical matters that every Christian should share the same point of view. If we lived in a society where eating meat was prohibited or deeply frowned upon, would it be wrong to follow this rule, even though we knew it to be perfectly OK to eat meat? Wouldn't the work of God be better done by following it?

The point here is that Christianity has, over the last two thousand years, attempted to become a central part of many different cultures and societies. These different cultures and societies have vastly differing opinions on whether or not it is right to do certain things. For instance, a woman being topless in public in an African tribe where it is common to do so would not raise eyebrows - indeed, these women are often featured in pre-watershed TV news articles on African tribes, because we accept that it is acceptable to their society. In the UK, however, even breastfeeding babies in public raises huge debate about its morality. Homosexuals are much more understood and accepted in British society now than they were a hundred years ago, so surely it is right to re-evaluate the Church's position on their ordination or acceptability within its own society?

Instead of taking traditional or Biblical views on ethical matters as they are presented to us, I feel that it is massively important to deeply consider every matter on which we are to form an opinion, and to try to bring it back to Christ - what would He do? If we just take things as read, be they from the Bible or from tradition or "standard" Church opinion, then we will end up with a Church in a 21st Century society conforming to 1st, 2nd, 17th, 18th, 19th Century ideals, which is never going to be attractive and will never make people want to come to our community. Every single matter which is not at the core of Christianity should be constantly up for analysis and change, and we should not be afraid to adopt new positions or ideas. In my opinion, our "ethics" should be flexible, based on our society and its views, and how our behaviour and beliefs could be interpreted. That is not to say that we should abandon everything for which we stand, just that we need to be constantly finding, again and again, the fine line of belief and behaviour which marks us out as God's people but still allows us to connect with those who are not.

17 - Sam is Published...

2008-04-14T15:48:00.004+01:00

Shameless self promotion here...

For those people who are interested, I have a paper published. In a pretty well-regarded journal as well - Reliability Engineering & System Safety. I am now some way towards being a reputable scholar. You can see the abstract for the paper (and pay to view the full thing) at Science Direct. If you already have an Athens username and password, and your university (if any) has subscribed to the publication, then bully for you.

But before you do, you might want to bear in mind that it's unlikely that you'll find this interesting. Unless you are interested in the reliability of aircraft and the ins and outs of fiddly ways of calculating it slightly more accurately. But if that's your bag, then feel free. I would put the full thing up here myself, but I don't own the IP and could well be taken from my residence and be beaten by the Russian mafia. Or sued, you know, whatever. Upon request, I can show you the paper (in physical form, in my hand).

The title of the paper is "Phased mission modelling of systems with maintenance-free operating periods using simulated Petri nets". It's quite innovative in the field of reliability and phased mission modelling, and is only a basic version of my full PhD topic. Very exciting!

I'll get me coat...

16 - You lucky, lucky bastard...

2008-04-04T14:27:00.008+01:00

Some would say that I'm quite a lucky guy. My family fairly regularly say that I'm "jammy". Things happen to me sometimes that are quite cool. I'm fairly sure that I'm not massively "luckier" than most people. I haven't won the lottery, which I've only played about five times, but then I've only ever won two things. The first was a scratchcard thing at school where I won a Ribena radio that hung round the ear and was superb (I've lost it now). The other was a raffle where before buying the raffle ticket I invoked the mantra of luck, "I'm not gonna win, I've only ever won one thing before - I never win raffles". I won a couple of bottles of real ale which, as a student, was practically liquid gold.

However, it is more in the area of important things - big opportunities, if you will - where I've been quite successful. The earliest thing I can think of where this lucky streak began was actually when I was 17 years old and in the Upper Sixth Form at my local school, BRGS in Rossendale, Lancashire. I was applying for Universities and had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I am brilliant at maths, so whatever I did was always going to include that as a topic. I chatted about it with my sister Lindsay who recommended that I apply to Loughborough University and look at Mathematical Engineering, which she really enjoyed and got a first in. So I did have a look at the prospectuses, and came to the conclusion that that sort of thing (maths, programming, engineering as a general subject) was pretty perfect. I applied to Bath, Bristol, Loughborough, UMIST as it was back then, and Nottingham Universities (I was never that interested in Cambridge or Oxford). I did the meetings/tours/interviews for the last four, after which I started getting offers in. Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol offered the usual offer of at least 24 points with an 'A' in maths. Loughborough offered me two 'E's, whilst clarifying that this was not the grade they expected me to get, but was the closest they could get to giving me an unconditional offer. Seeing as Loughborough clearly wanted me a lot more than the others, and Loughborough University 'felt' right, I followed my nose and duly ended up there.

That summer between Sixth Form and University, I needed to get some work, so I looked for jobs in the area. There was one job which involved ironing for minimum wage, so I didn't apply for that, but instead went for ASDA, in spite of my perfectly-able school friends applying but not getting anywhere. That was the only job I applied for that summer, and I got it. Lucky indeed.

I applied to stay in the same hall that my sister had stayed in, not out of some misty-eyed wish to follow in her footsteps, but mainly because it was the best combination of price and niceness*, but mainly price, that there was. Plus, it was catered, and I'd only ever baked cakes and biscuits before. I moved into my hall on the last Thursday in late September 2001, at the same time that all my fellow freshers moved into halls with me. There were loads of guys there that I spent the next few years keeping in touch with, but there was one girl who moved into a room just round the corner who moved her stuff in, stayed a couple of hours crying, and then moved out again. I have no idea why - we barely had time to say hello. I did get chatting to the girl in the room across the hall from her, Helen. The first few days passed, and everything was going swimmingly - I was getting on famously with my new mates and having a wonderful time, as most freshers do. Loughborough really was the best choice to have made and how lucky was I?**

On the Sunday or Monday, though, a new girl called Alex moved in. It turned out that she'd been pretty disorganised and forgotten to send in her room bond, so hadn't been given any accommodation, and spent the first weekend in a hotel in Loughborough crying. She could move into the vacant room that random-crying-girl had left on that first day. I fancied her a little bit and so naturally did my best to become good mates with her (which we did). She had a boyfriend at the time, which was a bit of a bugger, but me, Alex, Helen and a good few others became fast friends. Alex liked computer games (like I did) and other stuff like that and we got to know each other pretty well, but things never really worked out in a romantic sense. However, after a couple of months, a girl who'd been Alex's really good mate since childhood came to visit for the weekend. I was chilling out, listening to The Offspring† when she arrived in the building, pulling her little suitcase behind her down the corridor. Because she was new and the other girls around me had got a little boring after a couple of months, my interest was, naturally, instantly piqued. That Friday evening ended up being rather a massive night out - I got so drunk that I blanked out for three hours between half ten and half one, having used up a full film of photos but refusing to believe or being incapable of remembering that I'd actually done so. In that time, incidentally, I happened to pull said new girl who, it turned out, was quite attracted to my coolness and fabulous good looks‡. I have no memory of that first kiss, but the subsequent ones more than made up for it. That girl, Christabel Biella, will be becoming my wife in one month's time and I am still madly in love and convinced that she is my soul-mate. I could have married her after two months, when I first fell in love with her, but if Alex had been well-organised, or if random-crying-girl had never gone mental and left, we likely would never have even met. Lucky or what?

When I was coming to the end of my degree, I needed to choose what I was going to do for a career. I genuinely had no idea, and wasn't too keen on making a decision. So, like so many students before me, I decided to do a post-graduate degree. I was looking at doing a Masters, but ended up 'falling into' a PhD post instead, making a lot more money in tax-free grants than I would have otherwise. Most of my undergrad mates left after my third year in Lufbra, and so I was forced to find accommodation in my first year of PhD-land by myself. But then I moved into a house full of five other people whom I genuinely enjoyed being around - every single one of them was utterly brilliant. We all go on about that house, because each person randomly moved into it without much or any prior contact with the others. It was so lucky.

In June or July of last year, when I was coming to the end of my funded PhD (the grant only lasted for three years), I was struggling to work out how to keep things going. I knew that I would need to get some work pronto, but I also needed to find somewhere to stay. But most people that rent accommodation will know that

(a) it costs loads of money, which I didn't have, and
(b) it tends to tie you into a set length of contract of usually nine months to a year, and I would only be staying there from October to April.

So I would be quite stuck with a 'normal' contract. I really didn't know what to do, so I just asked all my mates if they knew of anything I could take advantage of. The breakthrough came when I mentioned, in passing, to a mate at church if he knew of any situations like that. He laughed and we chatted about it a bit, but then he had a brainwave and pointed out something in the church newsletter. It turned out that there was a 85-year-old chap who lived in a four-bedroom house in a village about five miles out of Loughborough who had recently been widowed and needed some care. Not round-the-clock attention, but just someone to close the curtains at night, do the washing-up, remind him to take his medicine, mow the lawns and keep the doors locked at night. They needed the person to live in the house to do all this, and they were not going to charge any rent. Now I don't know about any other arrangements like this, but this one was pretty unique and so I jumped at the chance. I met the guy and his son (who was organising things) and charmed them enough that they selected me to be their guy. Sadly, George ended up being quite ill and has not lived in the house for the last six months. Even so, I recognise that I fell into the opportunity of a lifetime! I moved in in September, and am moving out tomorrow, having no tied-in contract at all. It couldn't have been a better solution.

When it came to applying for a job, I really didn't get my arse in gear in time to start straight after the funding ended. In fact, my search for a job was pretty rubbish and, in spite of my imminent financial doom and Christabel's best efforts to help, I just couldn't muster up the energy to do much about it. I half-heartedly joined a couple of recruitment agencies, sent my CV around to a couple of places, but wasn't getting anywhere. I still wasn't sure that I needed to work.

But one night I had a dream, a really simple dream where I was in a job doing something fairly easy and sedate. It felt fantastic to have a secure job, secure finances and a secure future. When I woke up straight after, I felt like I had a ~~second~~ first wind with the jobs stuff, and immediately turned on my laptop to begin the search. I had been, for a long time, receiving emails about graduate jobs throughout the UK, but they always went to my junk mail and I hardly ever read them. This morning, however, I checked out a new mail from graduate jobs that had come through. The top advertised job, as it turned out, was for a mathematical modeller (the perfect job for me) in the Loughborough area! In fact, it was for BAE Systems, the company who had sponsored my PhD, and was based in a building about 500m from my old Uni office. This was just, frankly, a ridiculous stroke of luck. I applied for it, but as it turned out the job had already gone to someone else. But the experience gave me the impetus to carry on and apply for other jobs. Well, one job: like before with ASDA, I only bothered actually applying for one, which was for a reliability and safety engineer at my current company, who are based in the same building as BAE. But I passed the interview with flying colours and got the job. My money was secure.

But it doesn't end there. I didn't just apply for the job because it was in Loughborough. You see, what with getting married in a month's time, Christabel and I need to sort out living together. Our relationship has always been long distance, but that doesn't really work when you're wed. Christabel has a pathological fear of living north of London, and so living with me in Loughborough wasn't an option. Plus, we were able to get a pretty nifty deal with accommodation as Christabel's parents have been really generous and helped us out. The flat we're moving into is in Chessington, so naturally this complicated job matters (and was one of the reasons why finding one was so hard in the first place). But, thankfully, ,my work have an office in Dorking, which is about ten miles away from Chessington. They must be one of the only companies in the country with an office here and one down there. Even better, they've been brilliant about sorting out a transfer to that office!

One might think, with all that evidence, that I've had a lot of luck and a lot of coincidence. I don't really believe that, though. You see, at each point in my life where this "luck" came about, I really needed something - a job, a house, a path, a woman, or whatever. And so I prayed about it, and in response to those prayers God has blessed me more than I ever could have wished. I don't think I especially deserve it (at least, not more than anyone else) and I'm not sure that my faith is so strong that it could move mountains, but God has been hugely generous to me over the last few years, and I am so grateful. But just as important in this story is the fact that while God can provide us with opportunities, it is we who need to seize them when they come along. At every turn, I could have ignored God and gone my own way, but I truly feel that had I done so, I wouldn't be as rich and successful (and I'm definitely not talking about money or status here) as I believe myself to be now. If you pray for something to happen, don't be surprised if you get the chance!

And finally, it's worth mentioning that if you pray for something, God may not always answer it in the way you expect. The solutions regarding my house and my job were unique and brilliant, but definitely not what I expected. Looking back over all those periods of my life, I can't help but feel that what I wanted at the time wouldn't have been much good for me. Only God knew what I needed.

* For those who've ever been or ever go to LU, Falkner-Eggington Court is the skankiest dive ever created by man.
** Note that I have no way to substantiate that argument - having never been a fresher at any other uni I can't really compare, but I'm pretty sure it was the best. So nyah.
† Not avoiding work. No no. I never did anything like that. Honest.
‡ Probably not my dancing though. Or my bank balance. Or my orange T-shirts.

15 - Sorry about that...

2008-03-20T09:50:00.005Z

It's been a little while since I last posted. Apologies for that. I had been intending to post up a suitably intellectual and educational explanation of the real meaning of Sharia (and it may well still appear), but first that requires that I actually do some research (something which, as a PhD research student, I have spent the last four years actively trying to avoid) and secondly that I hand it over to a Muslim friend of mine to check that I haven't written anything that could potentially get me killed.

Another reason for the lack of postage is because (a) I couldn't think of anything to write and (b) my lunchtimes ended up being used to check the BBC sports website and some webcomics (try out the excellent xkcd and the Perry Bible Fellowship but mind out for the wee swearies dotted around, kiddies). Here's an example of the type of thing xkcd have (Jon Pearson will love this):

I still can't really think of anything that amazing, to be honest. Just a few small points then:

Point 1 - Picky picky picky

The English Language is weird. Consider the word "benign", used to describe a tumour which is playing nicely, exists in one place and is hopefully easy to remove, and the word "malignant", used to describe a nasty, horrible tumour which is breaking into pieces, left, right and centre and is one heck of a lot more dangerous. Note, I am not a medical doctor, and I'm sure that those who are could point out a whole myriad of flaws in what I just said. I don't care - just roll with the general point of view please.
Both words are adjectives, or 'describing' words, like red or smelly or British. "Benign" uses the stem "beni" which is Latin for good, while "Malignant" uses the stem "mali" which is Latin for bad. Again, I don't speak Latin. Probably wrong. Don't care. OK then, in Italian, at least, "bene" (Ben-ay) means good and "male" (Mahl-ay) means bad. And who knows Latin better than the Italians? That'll do for now. These stems crop up in other words that we use on a regular basis, such as "benefit", "malicious", "malnourished", and in words where the two stems can be swapped to provide the opposite meaning, such as "benediction" (a gift) and "malediction" (a curse).
Hopefully you've noticed a big difference between "malignant" and "benign" then. Why have these two words prevailed? The mathematician in me is, frankly, screaming that they haven't followed the pattern: either it should be "malignant" and "benignant" or "malign" and "benign". These middle two words are actually words too, and adjectives at that, meaning what they should mean. I prefer the latter set of words - fewer syllables. So, doctors: let's start a tiny revolution.

Point 2 - FEDtacularly EXcellent

Head on over to the FedEx website and tell me what's special about the logo. It's won awards. I know why. Don't look it up on Wikipedia please - try to figure it out for yourself.

Point 3 - Scouting for a Smack

Scouting for Girls, the band, have a song, I'm not over you, with the following lyrics:

I'm not over you
And I know that I should be
I'm not over you
And I know that I never will

It is at this point that everything within my soul wants to grab the singer/writer by the shirt and scream into his face, "BE!". These are the problems of having a compulsive desire to do grammar right.

Point 4 - Old Queens and New Queens

Apparently Queen are about to release a new album. Except that it's Paul Rodgers (from Free, who are primarily famous for the song "All Right Now", which is primarily famous for being in a Wrigley's chewing gum advert and appearing on the original Gladiators soundtrack which my brother bought) on vocals, not Freddie, 'cos Freddie's deaddie. And John Deacon retired about ten years ago. So it's May Rodgers Taylor, rather than Queen. Who wants to bet that the new album will be any good?

Lemma 1 - Two different sets of parallel laws for two different communities

2008-02-24T13:38:00.008Z

This is a lemma - it is not a full blog post, just a simple explanation of a fact in preparation for a future blog - something easy to get your heads around before I discuss something a great deal more complex.

In mathematics, a lemma is a proven proposition used as a stepping-stone to prove something larger. I'm going to use it here to explain a point of view.

Consider:

In this country (the UK), there are two ways of getting married. The first, and oldest, is to be married through the Church of England. The second, more recent, one is to be married anywhere else. Everyone (apart from Quakers, according to my mum) who does not wish to be married in a Church of England ceremony must have a registrar present for the marriage to be legally accepted.

To explain some of the legalities so far as I understand them, if Christabel (my fiancée) and I were to be married in a registry office, then we would need to give fifteen days' notice, and the ceremony itself requires very little vowing or other posturing. Divorcees can be remarried here, and the legal part (the vow-making and the signing of the register) is not allowed to have any religious element. Other potential wedding venues, such as Catholic churches or mosques, obviously are allowed to have religious elements, but a registrar needs to be present to legalise the marriage and there is no legal requirement over and above those to be found in a registry office.

As it is, Christabel and I have gone down the route of having our wedding in a C of E church in Loughborough. As a result, the laws are very different. Firstly, in order to legally be able to do it, fifteen days' notice is not sufficient: the banns of marriage must be read out three times in the three months preceding the event, in both of our home parishes (St. Mary, East Leake and St. Mary-the-Virgin, Chessington) and also in the Church in which we are getting married (Emmanuel, Loughborough). We can only marry in this different Church because I am on the electoral roll there, as it is my regular place of worship. There are three other ways of gaining a licence to get married in a Church:

Common Licence - issued by the Diocesan Bishop only in special circumstances, such as having lived in that parish in the past or if the marriage needs to take place quickly if, for example, a soldier will be imminently posted overseas,
Archbishop's Licence - issued by the Archbishop in very special circumstances, such as a deathbed marriage,
Superintendent Registrar's Certificate

Once the banns have been read (and assuming no one has raised an objection to the wedding), the wedding itself must legally contain certain elements. For instance, the way the bride and groom hold each other's hands when they are saying their vows is legally critical, as are the vows themselves - they must be repeated exactly as the vicar states. The rings are important as well. If one of the marriage candidates is divorced and their ex-partner is still alive, they cannot be married in the Church of England.

So, as you can see, for those people who choose to submit themselves to the authority of the Church of England or the Church of Wales, one set of laws applies. For those who wish not to, another set of laws applies, and the UK state will not consider a couple married unless the laws of the authority to which they have chosen to submit themselves have been satisfied.

14 - Every Breath You Take

2008-02-13T12:30:00.005Z

Why not "Episode 14"?

OK, so the "episodes" thing got a bit old already. They're just going to be numbers and names from here-on-in.

Right - get on with it then.

Yeah, yeah: I'm getting a little bit concerned at the way in which we Britons are being scrutinised, watched, and followed in our daily lives. I reckon a lot of people don't even realise.

What are you on about?

Consider Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) for instance. I bet most of you don't even know it exists. It was born and bred in the UK and then exported to other countries (they don't have anywhere near the level of coverage of the UK, however). The general idea is that cameras are set up around the country, such as in city centres, on all motorway bridges, major roads, petrol stations and ports, which can read your car's number plate. The data for every car movement in the country can be read, with 50 million number plate "reads" capable of being stored per day. This figure is set to double at some point this year - allowing 36 billion records to be kept each year. The time, date and place of each reading will be stored for five years.

Wow... so what's it for?

Well, I'm sure we can all see that it is a very valid and useful way of allowing the police to follow wanted criminals: for instance helping to track down the murderers of Sharon Beshenivsky, the policewoman who was shot and killed in Bradford two years ago.

Sounds fair enough to me!

Absolutely. The more extreme the crime, the more we think "fair enough" when ANPR helps to resolve it. It can also be used to flag up suspected cases of number-plate copying, if the same one appears in two impossibly close times for two distant places. Oh, and also they can cross-check your car with the database of properly taxed and insured cars, to make sure you're not cheating the system.

Well, if people will try to drive illegally, serves them right if they get caught!

That's a very valid point. These cameras may also be adapted to spot instances of driving while using a mobile phone or without wearing a seatbelt. If that's possible, then it's not inconceivable to imagine a future where a picture of the driver is taken and matched to the photograph on the driving licences of the registered drivers to check the right person is driving the car, and legally. Which again raises the possibility of a person being tracked round the country.

Hmm... I think I see where this is going...

So do the Government. Other initiatives (either proposed or active) to make sure we're all toeing the line include:

Forcing us all to carry around identity cards at all times. These ID cards by law may contain information on all ten fingerprints, a digitised facial and iris scan, all current and previous domestic and international places of residence. The Identity Cards Act 2006 has already been passed by parliament.
Forcing your Internet Service Providers to shop any cases of suspected copyright infringement to the authorities.
Creating a database of all 14+ year-old students' education record so that employers can check that no one has told any porky-pies on their CVs. Everyone will thus have a unique "lifelong learner" number.
Creating another national database of DNA, which is mainly applied to criminals both past and present, but includes some others too. 5.2% of the population are now on the database, more than any other country.
Allowing the 2011 census to be operated by either Lockheed Martin, an American company which is actually a defence contractor (the world's largest) and who just happen to manufacture nuclear missiles, or German telecoms company T-Systems.
Interviewing ALL first-time applicants for passports (either in person or, if not possible, by webcam) to ensure that they are who they say they are.

That's rather a lot of databases and observation!

You're not wrong. Cast your mind to other schemes as well, such as road-pricing, which may well start off harmlessly enough - placing a GPS box in your car to track how far you've driven and tax you accordingly - but which could well (and given our Government's track record, probably will) be adapted to being used by the police to follow you in real-time, or checking whether or not you're speeding or driving dangerously.

But surely, if people aren't doing anything wrong, then what's the problem?

This is perhaps the most commonly used reason to justify keeping an eye on us. When the announcement about potentially forcing ISPs to ban people who illegally download came along, I found myself feeling rather uneasy, and tried to work out why: after all, why shouldn't people who break the law be caught?

Firstly, one problem I have is that in doing all of this, the Government is recording so much information about us, and frankly I don't have the confidence that it will always be used for laudable reasons. And let's face it, they don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to keeping the data secure - as reported here and here. And here, here, here, here, here, here and here. How do we know that it won't be sold on in the future, to "generate income" for the country?

Secondly, while I agree that there is no excuse for breaking the law, I object to the inherent distrust that keeping tabs on us all seems to show - the public cannot be trusted to act in good faith, or behave responsibly, so we're going to use measures to make sure that they do. If we're in a country (and we are) where peoples' lack of acceptance of personal responsibility in society is causing social issues, then how is this going to help?

Thirdly, they don't make people feel safer - if CCTV cameras are everywhere, all this does is generate fear: fear that they are there to protect you from all the evils that are around you - you can never be safe, fear of the Government watching you at all times, fear that the slightest bad decision might lead to a fine or a gaol sentence.

Finally, I believe that it's inherently a massive violation of our right to freedom. If I want to buy a bottle of wine from a shop, I feel that I should have the right to do this without cameras watching the journey, people knowing I've taken money out of my account, a CCTV camera following me when I go in to buy it or some spotty girl asking me, in spite of my beard and suit, whether I am in fact over 18. Why can no one in this country be trusted?

You tell me.

Episode 13 - Lent Me Your Ears...

2008-02-05T11:28:00.000Z

It's Lent tomorrow.

It's a really odd period, Lent (from Old English lencten, meaning spring). You're supposed to fast luxury food items, eating only the simplest of foodstuffs, but most people only stick to certain foods, such as chocolate, alcohol or tea. It doesn't have a specific Jewish relative, as far as I know, but rather is a symbol of Jesus' 40 days in the desert, and cashes in on the symbolism of the number forty in the Bible (Noah's forty days and nights on the ark, the Hebrews' forty years in the desert, etc).

It isn't actually forty days either - Sundays don't count because Sundays are supposed to be feast days, but most people don't know that. This means that the period of Lent from Ash Wednesday to Easter Saturday actually measures in at 46 days. It's reasonably well-known in the UK, although not often adhered to, and is fairly unique in being a well-known Christian period which hasn't been massively commercialised and converted to a secular event.

It starts on Ash Wednesday, the day after Shrove Tuesday (or Pancake Day): the reasons for having pancakes historically being to get rid of all those fantastically luxurious foods such as eggs, sugar and milk before the time of shriving - an old word meaning to obtain absolution for one's sins by confessing and doing penance - which all good Christian people were supposed to do on the day before Lent began.

The really interesting thing, to me, is the penetration of Lent in the mind of the British public. I had a chat with two of my British work colleagues (and one Lithuanian, who I imagine has been exposed to the Russian Orthodox church, about which I know next to nothing) about Lent, and bearing in mind that neither of them go to church for any reason other than to butter up their relevant vicars for their imminent weddings, we had a reasonable chat about it, without any awkwardness about trying to "insert" some mention of Christ into the conversation.

In spite of this, it's a period which doesn't really get a lot of coverage in Christian circles. I can't remember any sermons dedicated to the idea of Lent. (although this fact is irrelevant, as I can only remember two sermons from my entire life of going to church). My fiancée, Christabel, refused to go along with Lent because she didn't see the point, and her family thought it was an old-world, high-Church, even Roman Catholic, event which had no relevance to the members of a modern free-evangelical church and which had no direct mention in the Bible. Personally, I think it was because she didn't want to give up chocolate, and a sit-down and a nice cup of tea is one of the best bits of her day.

But while I agree that it is perhaps quite a high-Church thing, keeping very much in line with the set calendar of events in the Christian year and the liturgical features of Anglican and Roman Catholic services, I'm going to disagree that it's irrelevant in today's world, and that it has no point.

Firstly, fasting is a great opportunity to connect with God. Browse through both the old and new testaments and there are countless stories of fasting and praying by prophets, priests and the people. As long as fasting is coupled with prayer, it can be incredibly useful and fulfilling. During a day of fasting from sunrise to sunset recently, I used the hunger pangs that I regularly felt as a reminder to pray to God, and think about things - something that can often be put to one side when we lead busy lives. Jesus expected it of his followers - note the "when you fast", not "if you fast". The early Christians fasted before making important decisions (e.g. Acts 14:23) As long as there is a purpose behind the fasting, and that purpose is put to good use, it can be incredibly useful as a time of spiritual growth.

Secondly, fasting is a great opportunity to connect with other people. One must be careful to avoid the sin of the Pharisees, who made a great show of their holiness by their public fasting. Jesus told us to fast so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
This was referring to the almost theatrical drama of putting on a sombre face and covering one's head in ash to display the holiness of the faster - Jesus recommended doing the opposite. This doesn't mean, however, that we should feel unable to talk about it at all. Fasting is something that can be very difficult, and it is important to have others around to support us when we do it. Similarly, if you usually have egg and ham sandwiches at lunch in the canteen with your work colleagues, it's hard to hide not eating them. Quietly abstaining from these, then, may prompt questions about what you are doing and why you are doing it. The resulting explanation of a personal belief is a fabulous opportunity to talk about your faith without being preachy.

Of course, fasting is something that should not be done lightly or without consideration of health - if you have medical reasons to be worried about fasting then perhaps you should leave it alone or speak to a doctor first. If you are fit as a fiddle, then I really would recommend it as something which adds a new dimension and vibrancy to your spiritual growth. Perhaps have a word with your minister or cell group about it, and see if you can get something up and running.

Besides, when Easter finally comes around, you'll look forward to and feel a lot better about eating that most holy of Christian relics, the chocolate egg made from rubbish chocolate wrapped in tin foil and placed in a plastic container in a cardboard box which also contains other items of chocolatey goodness.

Episode 12 - Avast, Me Hearties!

2008-02-01T12:35:00.001Z

You may have heard about a court case in Sweden which deals with a charge of "conspiracy to break copyright law", levelled against a website called the Pirate Bay, from plaintiffs such as Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI. Obviously, 'piracy' of music, films, television programmes and software has been rife for a long time. I thought I would try to offer a personal Christian perspective on the situation.

First up, the obvious thing. If we assume that the national law doesn't contradict our Christian morals, then we have to accept that breaking it is not something that Christians (or anyone, for that matter) should be doing. So if breaking copyright rules is a crime (which it is in England and Wales, and in most other countries), then don't do it. It's that simple.

However, I do have some thoughts aside from this simple rule. Firstly, the name: "piracy". It's fairly widely accepted, but, let's face it, it's a world away from Captain Hook or Long John Silver. It's not even that close to real maritime piracy that goes on today. I think calling copyright theft "piracy" makes the people who complain about it seem rather irrational and too eager to dress up their complaints, resulting in a much lower level of sympathy than they might otherwise have received from the general public.

For instance, FACT, (the Federation Against Copyright Theft), often introduce movies with a spiel about how "copyright theft is a CRIME" (you can practically see the veins popping out of their heads as they say this). But some time ago, these skits featured a comment about how it was also fuelling terrorism. Whether this is true or not (and I don't know), the lack of provision of any evidence or qualification to this allegation - which is, admittedly, hard to include in a 30-second film - led to a great degree of mocking and derision from people who saw it. It was promptly removed, with a bit of grumbling from FACT. These things do not help.

Secondly, the "theft" side of things. Again, it's not a very accurate term. Breaking into someone's house or a shop and stealing their things is what has usually been thought of as theft. In this instance, however, it is not so much about a physical product that has been stolen but the potential for someone to legally buy that item. If I download a copy of Windows illegally, then Microsoft haven't lost money, rather they have not gained the £100 or so that I would have paid, which is a slightly different thing. Similarly, the person from whom I copy it has not lost their own copy. So it's not exactly theft, more a loss of sales. I'm not saying that makes it right, I'm just being picky about the terminology.

I suppose the real crux of the matter comes down to people's attitudes regarding the big "evil" companies who sell their wares for high prices. These companies really do not help themselves that much. I was one of the people who witnessed the growth of Napster from something rather underground to a huge phenomenon, back in 1999-2000. It really took off, and many people were probably unaware of the legalities of what they were doing - it was so simple and easy to download almost any song you wanted for free, so people did.

The big music companies took so long to notice and respond to the blatant copyright infringement that they allowed something huge to grow. They also didn't notice people's desires to listen to music from their computer rather than their hi-fi's. So when they eventually successfully sued Napster and forced it to shut down, the germ of knowledge about downloading from the internet had seeped into the public's conscience. It was all over the news, and the loss of Napster merely forced people to look elsewhere for their data.

But then the really stupid thing is that after Napster was shut down, they didn't make any decent efforts to immediately replace it with a legal alternative for the whole range of songs that could be illegally downloaded. iTunes Music Store was only released first in America in April 2003, three years after the whole thing started. Television and film downloads have only been available in the last couple of years. Europeans had no access until it was launched in France, Germany and the UK in June 2004, and much of the rest of western Europe four months later.

Thus, even people who accepted the arguments behind the suing of Napster found it difficult to get hold of the songs they wanted, directing users to Audiogalaxy, Kazaa and Ares, amongst others. The latter two did not merely offer music downloads but videos, software and so on. Obviously, the dawn of Broadband has helped their causes massively, but one can't help but feel that if the music, film, TV and software companies had acted sooner to stop all this, to notice the revolution and to change their business models then it wouldn't be a problem.

Another issue in this emotive topic is people's opinions of the companies themselves. The frivolous lawsuits, the high prices they charge for a CD or DVD, their slowness, their general attitude to the public all seemed misdirected. The public did not feel "loved" or appreciated by the "big evil multinationals", but understood themselves to be regarded as cash cows instead. Even many of the people who create the content are getting disgruntled - Paul McCartney left EMI and released his latest album through Starbucks instead; Radiohead initially released their album online for whatever people wanted to pay for it; and the Writer's Guild of America are striking, halting production on almost all TV programs over there, because they want more money from the things they write, and the TV companies are refusing to give it to them.

People see the film, music, TV and software companies as greedy. Despite many seeing their cause as legally just, they view the way that the issue is handled as ridiculously flawed. Suing sites such as The Pirate Bay will simply lead to people going elsewhere, and finding new ways to get hold of their stuff. Using Digital Rights Management (DRM) has caused so much irritation to the public, especially in the wake of the Sony BMG fiasco, that many of them are starting to back down from using it. Complaining about and litigating against companies who sell standard CDs online for cheaper than in the shops reduces sympathy as well - the customer thinks, "why are these companies so determined to limit our freedoms to put these songs where we want, to stop us buying cheap CDs, and to sue their own customers? Why do they have to be so backwards and greedy?"

So yes, the cause might be just, and copyright "theft" might well be illegal, but the public relations between the providers of the content and those who purchase it are at such a low ebb that one really doesn't see how the music companies can gain back their trust and support. It seems there is a lot of growing up to do.

Episode 11 - The Nose Knows No Snows

2008-01-31T12:36:00.000Z

You know how it is. You're sat at your desk, or watching TV, when suddenly you realise you're only breathing properly through one nostril. Panic sets in as you start to wonder if you're getting a cold. Does your throat hurt? Was your hearing a bit defective today? Did you irritate all your friends and colleagues with a cough that can only be described as seismic?

So why do we most often only breathe properly through one nostril? This question used to vex me a lot as a young lad. I bet, if you close off one nostril with your finger, it will be hard to breathe through one and really easy to breathe through the other. Assuming, obviously, that

You have a nose
You have two nostrils
You don't actually have a cold or the 'flu'.

[Incidentally, why is influenza usually written only as 'flu? If you're going to use an apostrophe to mark the omission of "in" from the start, then why not go the whole hog and mark the omission of the "enza" at the end? Otherwise you're suggesting the proper name for flu is "influ", which is just silly.

Anyway... I digress.]

(Mine is the right one at the moment).

If you are breathing happily through both nostrils, try again in twenty minutes' time.

The answer to this question pleases me immensely. I was so, so happy when I found out. The thing is, there's something called the nasal cycle. Basically, if you're breathing mainly through your right nostril at the moment, then in twenty minutes to two hours you will be breathing through your left one. They swap round.

To demonstrate this, I spent my day at work on Monday recording hourly which was the dominant nostril. The graph below shows this.
'1' indicates my left nostril, is most active, '3' is my right nostril and '2' is both being active. It's obviously a bit up and down but then you'd expect that. The regularity of it changes too - that's a normal state, though apparently a small number of people are very regular.

(It's left now)

The way that they swap is down to some erectile tissue tucked up your schnozz. It opens in one nostril through a decreased blood-flow and closes in the other when the blood-flow increases.

So why do they swap? Well, no one really appears to know for definite, but there are some theories about the nasal cycle in general:

You smell some smells best if the particles linger around in your nose for a while. You smell others best if they pass over the smell receptors quickly. Controlling two different flow rates through your two nostrils allows both these types of smell particles to be sensed at the same time.
Older people have a weaker nasal cycle, apparently.
It's linked to regular changes in which hemisphere of the brain is most dominantly active.

So there. The nasal cycle. I bet you really wanted to know that. Isn't it odd that something like this, so easily demonstrable, was only first noted in 1895? And it shows rather neatly that our bodies are weird.

Episode 10 - PaperWatch

2008-01-30T12:35:00.000Z

Here it is again: PaperWatch, dedicated to bringing you the lowdown on all the cliché and bile that seems omnipresent in Britain's favourite tabloids.

First up is the Daily ~~Wail~~ Mail. So what's on today's agenda?

Well, we have a story about how a woman who was convicted of perverting the course of justice because she wrongly believed her boyfriend to be innocent of murder is engaged and possibly pregnant. Particularly humorous in this story is the utter lack of any attempt to retain objectivity: "The news will devastate the parents", "proceedings which are likely to cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds" (of course... don't want to forget about the effect on the taxpayer), and "The draconian injunction means that not even the nature of her work can be revealed". By 'eck, you mean a woman who has served her sentence and wants some happiness actually has a chance to be happy and rehabilitated into society? Dear God! She must be stopped! Some of the comments are particularly amusing as well.
We also have the usual stories on Missing Generic Blonde Girl, something else affecting the taxpayer, and some political correctness gubbins.

The Daily Express then:

Home owners... mortgages... housing market... first-time buyers... blah de blah de blah
Apparently, in an unbelievable scoop, someone has discovered that we're paying stealth taxes. Save the children!
Also, just in case you hadn't noticed, Britney is a nutter.
Note, by the way, the people Express employs as columnists include such shining lights of considered opinion as Richard and Judy talking about how Richard doesn't wear underpants ("his undercarriage flaps freely no matter what trousers he is wearing, whether in tight jeans or an elegant designer suit"); Ann Widdecombe whinging about McDonalds; and, amazingly enough, someone who doesn't like Gordon Brown. Who is he? No idea.

A quick round up of the others:

The Sun: Mental Britney; an excuse to show a really really large picture of a scantily-clad schoolgirl; and Lego Porn (I'm not joking)
Daily Mirror: Mental Britney; Someone who nobody cares about might die; Cheating footballer
Daily Star: Main headline - Woman in bra; Big Brother? (Is that still running?!); Somebody who gets her boobs out is a bit sick

Lovely stuff. Ta-ra for now.

Episode 9 - A Quick Diversion

2008-01-28T12:14:00.000Z

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "All this stuff about theology and feminism is great, but how do I make my own Universal Indicator?"

Well, you need not worry about this any longer, because I have an answer to your problem.

For those who can't be bothered to click on the hyperlink and read the Wikipedia gubbins, universal indicator is used to test the pH of a solution. The pH level of a solution dictates whether something is alkaline or acidic, and how strongly. A lot of people would naturally think of acids as being more dangerous than alkalis, but this is not so - many of your household cleaning products (such as bleach or oven cleaner) will use alkalis for their action and not acids. And these products can be highly corrosive and dangerous, so please use them carefully (use rubber gloves), or not at all (get your mum/wife/dad/husband to clean the oven).

So then: universal indicator. It is not difficult to make:

1. Boil up some chopped red cabbage.
2. Strain the red cabbage and keep the water.

And there you have it.

Some suggestions for ordinary things you may want to test for their pH values are:

1. Normal tap water
2. Bicarbonate of soda
3. Lemon juice
4. Vinegar
5. Soap
6. Salt-water
7. Cola

For all of these items (except the tap water), mix a small amount of it in water before using the UI. If the solution turns red or pink, it's an acid. If it turns blue it's an alkali. There are obviously some more interesting things you can test but I'm not going to spell them out for you. And, once again - PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT TEST DANGEROUS LIQUIDS!! (Unless you have lots of qualifications in science and all the appropriate safety equipment and several paramedics and firemen standing guard should the worst happen. In fact, not even then. Just don't.)

---------------------------------

You may possibly be wondering why red cabbage can be used to make a universal indicator. This is because of the pigment which makes it red, called anthocyanin, which occurs naturally in lots of different plants. It makes apples red, pansies purple and blackcurrants... sort of purpley-red. Interestingly, there has been some testing done which suggests that some anthocyanins may play a role in preventing cancer cell growth. So eat lots of berries, y'all.

Episode 8 - Women Priests and Paul

2008-01-24T20:00:00.000Z

I found Nem's blog about Judges very interesting, and thought I would post my thoughts on something similar.

The role of women in the church is something that has gone through a lot of change recently: twenty years ago, the thought of having female vicars in the Church of England was a pipe dream, and for many in the Church was something that shouldn't happen. In 1992 the C of E agreed that the ordination of women would go ahead. Many other protestant denominations have many other views on it, and different levels which they ordinate women to (Canada, USA and New Zealand have female bishops, England has only female vicars). The Catholic church does not allow women to become priests, and indeed does not believe that it has even the right to allow it: Pope John Paul II announced, in 1994, that it would not be allowed and the matter was closed.

Two of the reasons that are often given for this are that:

Jesus chose only men for his apostles.
Paul's words in 1 Timothy, which include

"...the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife..." (Chapter 3)

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man..." (Chapter 2)

Similarly to Nem's response to Judges, this doesn't sit easily with me, because like many people in our society, I've been raised to think of women as deserving of the same rights as men. So how are Paul's views compatible with modern-day thoughts on the role of women in society, in the home and in places of authority?

Is it possible that Paul is wrong? Does it contradict the idea of us all being equal in Christ? Is it even right to question the things that are written in the Bible? Or should all these things be taken in context? Can and should the views of the Church change over time?

It's a really tricky issue. And I don't know if there is an ultimate "truth" or one single policy which is right about it. I think, for instance, that in Paul's words there may well be an issue of acceptance of the Church: one of Paul's tasks was to help the Early Church be a beacon to the societies in which they were based. They were to utterly dissociate themselves from everything sinful that went on around them, and do it visibly - for instance, women in Corinth should keep their hair long, so they couldn't be thought of as priestesses of a different religion. He wanted those unfamiliar with the Church and it's aims to see it as something attractive, something worth being part of. Perhaps Paul wrote these things to make sure that the Church didn't alienate the societies of the first century by allowing women to be in too high a position, against the views of many. I'm not an expert on the history of those societies so I don't know for sure.

And besides, Paul was writing to Timothy, a young leader of the church in Ephesus, to give him some tips on leadership and how to be accepted by those in the church in spite of his age. Are Paul's private opinions and thoughts, which I assume were fairly typical for his time, still applicable today? If he says "I do not...", does that refer to his personal views or something we should still follow today? Have we even understood all of the reasons why Paul said this?

What I do know is that for many people in this day and age, not to ordain women is something that would be or is unattractive about the Church, something seen as backwards. And I think that if God wants to have women in the church in positions of authority, such as the prophetesses in the Old Testament (which Jewish tradition indicates there were 600,000 of, equal to the number of male prophets), then to contradict that is to go against God. Is that what he wants?

What do you think?

Episode 7 - Tricky one, this.

2008-01-23T13:05:00.000Z

I have a point of view which a lot of people will be horrified by. It's a terribly un-fashionable point of view, you see. It is one which disagrees with most Western thinking, and in its basic core argument agrees with some people who have been positively identified as enemies of the Western world and democracy.

Before I clarify what I'm rabbiting on about, consider the following facts:

I am nearly Jewish - my mother's father's mother and my mother's mother's mother's father were both Jewish. This means that I am three sixteenths Jewish by ancestry and, if my matrilineal great-great grandmother were also Jewish, I would be considered fully Jewish because of Jewish matrilineality
I appear to have a fairly natural inclination towards things which have a Jewish feel - Jewish-ish songs that were sung in church (Jubilate Everybody, You Shall Go Out With Joy) were and remain some of my favourites, for instance, and were even at a time when I was unaware of my Jewish roots.
I am in no way anti-Semitic (I don't hate the people of the Middle East) or anti-Jewish, and I think that people who are, are poorly-educated and vile.

You may be tensing up to hear something deeply shocking. Well, it's not so bad when one gets to the deeper, underlying issues. But many people ignore these, hence the level of general animosity to what I am about to state:

I am an anti-Zionist. I don't think the state of Israel should have been created. I think that it was a mistake.

I'm not going to go to massive lengths to explain my arguments, as I'm on my lunch break and can't be bothered, but now let me clarify a few more points here:

I don't hate Zionists. I just think that they are wrong.
I don't think the state of Israel, having been created in 1948, should now be "wiped off the face of the planet". It's here, so it may as well be here to stay.
I think that equating anti-Zionism with anti-Judaism is an emotionally-charged, unhelpful, and massively incorrect thing to do. One is a political opinion, the other is a racist outlook.
I support the idea of the Jewish people having a homeland, somewhere that they can call their country. I think, however, that this should be somewhere far, far away from the Middle East. Like Utah. Or Quebec.
I think that the creation of Israel is one of the biggest causes of the present-day unrest in the Middle-East, and has ultimately led to extremist Islamic terrorists hating both Israel and the West.
I think that utterly ignoring the views of the native Palestinian people for sixty years has not been massively helpful.
I may well have utterly misunderstood or vaguely misremembered the history of how the state of Israel was created. If this is the case, then accept my apologies and please point out to me neutral sources which explain what really happened.

As far as I understand the history of this, the basic premises are that the area now known as Israel used to be populated by a mix of Palestinian Muslims, Jews and Christians. During the 19th Century a movement began in the West supporting the idea of a Jewish homeland. It gained ground slowly, and Jews began to gradually move to the Palestinian area. These Jews were not of Palestinian origin, and many came from Eastern Europe. Many Palestinians began to be displaced. Following the Holocaust during World War II, guilt over the lack of intervention by the Allies, and a desire for an ally in the Middle-East led Britain and the US to officially support the creation of the state of Israel, and it was granted independence in 1948.

I believe that something that has existed officially for sixty years and as an idea for around only double or triple that should not take precedence over something that existed for thousands of years previously. I believe that the Palestinian people have a right to reclaim what was theirs for such a long time. I believe that the violence shown by both the Israelis and the Palestinians is wrong. I believe that the unquestioned alliance between the US and Israel is misguided and flawed. I believe that the bias of the West towards Israel is also wrong.

Finally, I believe that people should have more of an open mind towards this issue. I am perfectly prepared to change my opinions if presented with verifiable and neutral sources, and am happy to discuss things. Please, add your comments on this fascinating issue. But please don't accuse me of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism and please keep your comments respectful.

Episode 6 - Politics? What?

2008-01-18T12:56:00.000Z

We all like to have a good old whinge about the Government in this country, don't we? Even people who don't vote, never will, have no interest in politics and no idea who is actually running the country, tend towards the assumption that politicians are mostly evil and just out for themselves.

Now, a deeper look into this will show that the larger part of the 646 MP's who have been elected are normal people who have a slightly deeper interest in politics than others. They have families, they like sport, church, reading, drinking, and so on. My old MP for Loughborough, Andy Reed is a great guy - he represents the constituency as best he can, and usually votes on issues in the same way that I would. He is the Chair of Christians in Parliament, plays a lot of sport and doesn't seem too power hungry. But then I moved to East Leake, which is represented by Kenneth Clarke. Ah well.

Anyway, much of the focus of corruption allegations or the assumption of selfishness is on the Cabinet or the Shadow Cabinet. People don't usually bother with the Lib Dems that much, unless it's to have a good laugh.

But this left me thinking - exactly why do we elect these people? I have a few issues with the way the whole thing is run.

We usually elect MPs often based on our own views on the suitability of the party, not the person himself.
If not elected due to party affiliation, then it's often due to popularity, looks or how much he tried to contact the electorate. But not because of his abilities.
If an MP is a member of a party, then he is usually bound to vote in Parliament according to the wishes of the party, not his own ethics or the views of his constituents.
The selection of MPs for cabinet posts is usually down to friendships, how loyal they've been to the party, how long they have been an MP, their desire for power, their ability to lie or spin or evade questions, or their connections to other powerful people. Again, not down to their ability to actually fulfil the role in question.
The NHS and education are two examples of institutions which should be run by people who understand the ins and outs of their relevant issues, such as funding, research, the best way forward, and things like that. People who have qualifications in the relevant areas. People who have no political motivation. However, the people who are put in charge, for instance, don't need to have relevant qualifications (such as Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, a PPE graduate, who specialises in economics, has worked for the treasury and who has no experience whatsoever of what it is like to be a teacher or a headmaster, how to run a school or the day-to-day issues that affect people in education). So instead of having these things run by people who know what they're doing, we end up with them being run by people with an agenda. And then we end up with some utter garbage as policy.
A lot of time, money and effort is spent not producing policies to help the nation gradually improve over a period of decades. Instead, we have Governments who hop from one election to the next, basing most of their policies based on what is popular, not what is needed, so that at the next election they can sweep back into incompetence.
Democracy gives everyone the same right to a voice - to vote in who they think is the best person to represent them. However, why should people who have no idea who they are voting for, or what their issues are, be able to vote? And people don't understand the system, either. The Prime Minister is not elected by the UK. He is elected by his constituency as an MP, and by his party as their leader. The people only vote in the party. And the leader of the party who is the most capable of forming a Government (usually the one with the majority, if one exists) gets made the PM by the Queen. Simple.
The constant push for improvement, a noble cause one might think, generally means that change is usually made for change's sake. Things must be different from the way they are now. Onwards, upwards, backwards, downwards, anywhere but here. A curriculum or style of teaching or focus of resources can't stay the way it is now for too long. Buzzwords get rolled out, masses of money is spent researching rubbish and bringing in new laws and the only thing that gets any better is the politicians' ability to talk up the latest Big Announcement. One rather hopes that one day a Governmental department might find themselves with nothing to do.
When Governments do get things right, no one cares. The press is only interested in how the country is going downhill (because of the Government, naturally), and the morale of the country is usually low.
Finally, people tend to simply get sick of Governments. The day will come when people will vote in the Conservatives in a landslide, not because their policies are better, but simply because they've grown bored of Labour. And then, ten or fifteen years further down the line, Labour will get back in.

Now I know this is a bit of a super-rant. But surely there has to be a better way to run the country than this shambles? Anyone have any ideas?

Episode 5 - The problem with churches today...

2008-01-16T08:00:00.000Z

First off, let me get one thing straight: I am a Christian. Have been all my life, and still am, in a big way. I go to church, I read my Bible and I pray. I make no apologies for discussing here an issue which may, perhaps, alienate some non-Christian readers. Yes, I believe in evolution. No, I don't think it contradicts the idea of a God. Yes, suffering happens - to both Christians and non-Christians, often in spite of prayer. That doesn't contradict it either. No, I don't hate gays, or women who've had abortions, or the doctors that perform them, or divorcees. I do have one problem, though.

You see, as far as I'm concerned, the core problem within the Christian church today isn't divorce, or "intelligent design", or adultery or abortion or homosexuality or any single ethical issue. The problem is politics. Those people who have stopped going to church because of politics know what I'm talking about. And it is the most infuriating, heart-breaking thing that stops the church being what it could be in today's world.

I know people who went to church as children, but left as teenagers and adults because of what they saw as hypocrisy in their church - for instance, being made to feel guilty for being a sinner every week by someone who is known to be having an affair or is a drunk. Similarly, the people in moderate positions of power often have aspirations of higher power, and will do almost anything, say almost anything in order to get there, including ruining the faith of those around them. If a new approach or idea is suggested, in the worst churches the idea is suppressed, and the person who proffered it chastised.

But this is not new, and is sadly something that is probably going to carry on happening as long as the organisation of the church stays the way it is, and humans stay the way they are. But it doesn't have to be like this forever.

You see, the reason that people are allowed to get away with this kind of behaviour is that most Christians usually spend far too much time trying to be nice, because most Christians also spend far too much time being far too sensitive about everything. You know what I'm talking about: Death, masturbation, abortion, homosexuality, politics - with many people, you can never say exactly what you mean to without having to avoid "insensitive" or "taboo" or "inappropriate" or "offensive" or even "challenging" language.

I'm not a big one for quoting Bible verses, due to lack of context, but Proverbs gives many verses in a fairly context-free environment: "A rebuke impresses a man of discernment, more than a hundred lashes a fool."(NIV) One point here is the wise man does make mistakes, but those around him are expected to rebuke him, and he is expected to be impressed (not hurt or angry or upset).

I strongly believe that is it important for those people in higher positions than us in the church to be challenged, to stop them remaining in their comfort zones and making their church irrelevant. Challenging someone doesn't necessarily mean that one has to be rude or inappropriate, as tact or diplomacy can achieve much more. But being a Christian doesn't mean we shouldn't be direct about an issue.

Consider Jesus. He was NOT a "nice" man. He was a "good" man - the best man, in fact. But he riled people who weren't doing what was right by calling them hypocrites, or by breaking the taboos of the society around him, or harshly rebuking his own followers using often deliberately rude (but true), disrespectful and tactless language. He was direct, not diplomatic. So are so many of the prophets in the old testament - they had would be given a mission from God to tell this King or that Emperor, "stop sinning or you will die, your people will suffer and your lands will be taken away from you, you wicked King." And they did, and usually ended up on a spike or a noose or a cross or a sword or a block. But they still did it, because their fear of God was greater than their fear of man or embarrassment or looking stupid.

Question: If your young daughter was about to run into a busy road, would you gently and softly pad up to her, carry her in your arms and say "It's ok, but try not to do that again"? Or would you leg it as fast as you can, snatch her out of the danger area and yell at her never to do something so dangerous and stupid again, before teaching them the proper way to cross the road? I would do the latter.

And this is my main point: we too have been given a mission by our role-model Jesus - to heal the sick, raise the dead, gather disciples and reach out to the poor and needy. And it is a vital mission. We are trying to bring people into eternal life, saving them from death. If someone supposedly aiming for the same goal is ruining that important mission, will you just let them, without challenging their views or, if you do, doing it so quietly and "tactfully" that it makes no difference? Or will you scream, shout, be occasionally inappropriate, rude or tactless, to make people see the flaws?

Because life is not a game. We are in this big time, and we need to get it right. Consider your mission from God a licence to challenge (in whatever way you think is right) anything with which you disagree. And don't be ashamed of it either.

Episode 4 - Grammar Fascism

2008-01-14T16:41:00.000Z

This is an interesting issue for me. I am a bit of a grammar Nazi. This means, in practice (not practise, which is a verb, except if you're American), that I tend to use a red pen to others' speech. The main recipient of this is my fiancée, Christabel, who is perhaps indicative of the current standards of speech for many middle-class young adults. The fact of the matter is that she would rather she wasn't, as is anyone: nobody likes to be corrected on every "technically" poor use of English. Especially by a Lancastrian.

Now, I should point out the inherent hypocrisy in my standpoint. I am by no means a grammatical Hercules. I make mistakes in the phrases I utter and the text I write, and am probably going to make quite a few in this very blog. But I am a mathematician/engineer, which (although it may seem contradictory to wanting to improve my own and others' English) makes me an incredibly picky person. This means that when I pick up on a pattern, such as not splitting infinitives, or the difference between less and fewer (more on these later), I refuse to let it go, like a rottweiler grabbing onto a child's head.

One often sees, when reading fora (or forums) on the internet, two types of people: those whose English is rather sloppy, and those who spend time correcting the other kind's English rather than discussing the topic at hand. Thus a debate is sparked along the lines of

"Y dont u get a life n stop corecting my spelling??!!"

"Why don't you learn to write properly?"

which often descends into repetition of arguments and, eventually, someone being likened to Hitler. A bilateral solution, therefore, may be to try to stop the second type being quite so anally retentive, and to get the first to stop sounding so stupid when trying to discuss potentially complex issues.

And this is the main point: chav-speak/l33tspeak may seem cool to you when you're in your groups of friends, but if you're having a serious discussion, or you're in a meeting or an interview, or giving a speech, it just serves to make you sound like an idiot, like someone who couldn't be bothered to learn their own language properly. Innit.

So, to this end, here are some tips for those who struggle with understanding certain issues of English Grammar:

Splitting infinitives occurs when one puts a word in between the word to and the verb it applies to. A classic example of this is "to boldly go where no one has gone before". The adverb "boldly" should have gone after the verb "go". Although opinion on this rule is divided, in most cases one should avoid it: use "not to go" rather than "to not go".
Probably the one thing which irritates me the most is incorrect use of "less" when one should have used "fewer". The former word applies to things which cannot be counted, or are continuous: less time, less water, less cyanide. "Fewer" is applicable where the following noun can be counted or is discrete in nature: fewer cats, fewer people, fewer arms.
A preposition is a word used to describe a relationship between things: I am from Lancashire, the cat is on the mat, le singe est dans l'arbre, Tom Peach is in his own little world. In the last of these examples, "Tom Peach" is the subject - the doer or the performer, "little world" is the object - the thing being used, done or performed. Try not to end a sentence using a preposition in formal language - not because it is in itself incorrect (this is only true when there is no object to which the preposition applies), but because many people think it is incorrect, and may think badly of you. If they point this out, take glee in correcting them.
Apostrophes denote either omission of letters from a word or phrase (it is -> it's) or possession (Sam's idiocy). Plurals will hardly ever use apostrophes - only for situations (such as "dot your i's and cross your t's") where a single "s" would look ambiguous.
Their - belongs to them. They're - they are. There - a place.
Your - belongs to you. You're - you are. Yore - a time long ago.
Its - belongs to it. It's - it is. If this one confuses you, remember you don't say "hi's" or "her's", but "his" and "hers".
"Who is he?" "Do you know to whom you speak?" Learn the difference.
Whose is the possessive of who. Not who's: "Whose is it?"

So there we are. Some rules. There are many, many more. Improve your English, and never have anyone think you are an moron ever again. For bad grammar, at least...

For my part, I promise not to be overzealous with the correcting of grammar, unless it's really, really annoying.

Episode 3 - PaperWatch

2008-01-06T23:08:00.000Z

You may or may not be aware that certain newspapers have a bit of a reputation for being rather overzealous when it comes to certain subjects . While this can get a bit repetitive, it can also be rather hilarious - especially when one actually meets the sort of person for whom these newspapers are a vital part of their existence. These types of people, if I may be allowed a crass and horribly sweeping mass generalisation, are often the sorts who complain loudly about immigrants taking all our jobs, the REAL Princess of Wales being an (in the words of my future mother-in-law) "evil woman" , the Government's stealth taxes sapping all our money, people claiming benefits, and other such things.

To this end, I have decided to start a little thread which I shall name PaperWatch - keeping an eye on those items in the papers (or on their websites) which are rather reminiscent of the stereotypes people attach to them. So here goes:

Mail on Sunday - you may notice on their front page a story about the tiny blonde thing that is Madeleine McCann, for all those wanting to keep up with this fascinating and fast-moving plot. There is a picture-story of Victoria Beckham, for those who care about her wearing a yellow dress, but our top story is... yes, that's right!... about immigration!
Sunday Express - Top story for this bunch is the Tories promising to slash the payments to 200,000 benefits "scroungers". Tucked inside this is a story about increased council taxes whilst services decline, but I think today's award for Best and Most Ridiculous Cliché goes to the Sunday Express for having not just one story, or two, but an entire section devoted to covering the Inquest into the Death of Princess Diana! (Note that this is more important than sport). Well done indeed!
News of the World - Mental Britney; Naked Keeley (warning: contains boobies); Big Brother
The People - Mental Winehouse; Missing McCann; Big Brother
Sunday Mirror - Mental Mills; Angry Beckham; Engaged Couple Enjoy Spending Time Together

Now, I don't wish to suggest that these stories aren't, in fact, less important than people dying in Kenya, or the fallout of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, but they are at the least, entertaining. And not in the way they're intended to be either.

Episode 2 - Love is a Losing Game...

2008-01-03T22:38:00.001Z

...well, it is for Amy Winehouse, the tanked-up crazy bint. Firstly, let me state that I think that AW has a good voice - but it's certainly nothing to go mental about. She has less talent, in my view, than Nerina Pallot, but a hell of a lot more than Pete Doherty, who is the trump card of famous useless smacked-up talentless tossers. However, our Amy seems to have some troubles being, well... human, so much so that she has, over time:

Appeared pissed on Never Mind the Buzzcocks
Had eating disorders and depression
Self-harmed
Married a permanently-trilbied utter pillock
Started taking drugs around the age of 14
Written a song about refusing to go into rehab...
...entered rehab with her equally mindless husband...
...and left after 5 days.
Got into a fist fight with said husband over doing drugs with a call girl
Been sued for copyright infringement
Been arrested in Norway (gotta hand it to her: at least it's somewhere a bit different) for possession of marijuana
Been under investigation after her husband (who apparently earns nothing independently of his wife) was arrested for perverting the course of justice...
...after he was accused of assaulting a bartender
Prompted her father and her parents-in-law to release statements to the press voicing concerns over her and her husband's behaviour and state of mind
Been booed by her fans in Birmingham and other gigs...
...until she cancelled that tour due to being advised to take a "complete rest".

On the plus side, she has heckled Bono during an awards show, which surely has to count for something.

Far be it from me to suggest that she's not exactly the greatest role-model for children (or indeed adults): what I find fascinating is that there doesn't appear to be any appreciation from her (or many other musical "artists" for that matter) of the sheer cliché which she is living. Drugs, fights, bad gigs, arrests - they've all been done before. It's just so boring. Not that that has stopped the press from making the most of it (but then, that's their job - imagine the hilarity of headlines reading: "WINEHOUSE DOES NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY"). Or that it has stopped me from commenting on it on here.

I don't know. I suppose things like this keep life that bit more interesting. But one can't help but feel - is this it? Is there nothing more? Are we all now reduced to being entertained by some silly cow and her moronic husband? Or should we just ignore it, get on with life, and stop pretending to care whether or not she and her husband kill themselves?

I know I have - go ahead Amy, do your worst. But if it's not about the music, I couldn't care less.

Pilot Blog - Kicking us off...

2008-01-02T22:30:00.001Z

Here's an idea...

I thought that I'd name these blog posts like TV series episodes. This may end up becoming the worst and stupidest idea since the Spice Girls decided that reforming after being broken up for so long would stop people mercilessly mocking them, rather than just reminding everyone how shit they were in the first place.

So anyway. I suppose I had better reveal something about myself, which you couldn't have found out from reading the info about the blog. I am now in the fourth year of a PhD which is coming towards its conclusion. This PhD is not terribly interesting. The best thing about it is the following picture which is to be featured in a forthcoming paper and probably my thesis (I have to get as much mileage from each piece of effort as possible).

Sadly, creating cool Powerpoint pictures is not the extent of the work - I have to do some programming. This will end soon. After this I have to use the program to do something. This will take slightly longer. Once this stage is finished, it's writing up. Then submitting for corrections. Then correcting, and submitting ad infinitum, until, in a dreamy, hazy, sunny world of delight waiting for me in my future, I get to hand in. This is something which my heart tells me will be some Austin Powers-style superfest of sexy Loughborough University students spontaneously breaking out into dance, with an unseen brass band playing the type of tune you would carry around in your head for days on end, as I make my way unchecked by traffic or rain across the lawn to the research student office; people lining the stairs with rapturous applause and the office actually being bloody well open.

My head, however, is assured that giving my thesis in will merely result in a vague feeling of 'huh', followed by 'K. I'm off home then.' This has happened to all my PhD colleagues, and occurred when I got my degree result back in 2004 (although this latter event could have been down to the combination of being widely expected to get a first and being the only person to actually be able to personally go and get his result that day).

However, even the handing in does not mark the end of this horribly long, long road. After that, I must defend my research in a viva, and finally graduate. If I were to submit in November this year, say, and a viva could not be arranged until January 2009, then I would not graduate until July 2009. A successful viva is, I believe, the point at which I can start insisting people refer to me as Doctor.

The graduation will require me to dress up like an Elizabethan minstrel but will, after hours of mindless clapping, at least be my final point as a student. After that, it's fast cars, the respect of the general public, the life of luxury and a wealthy career. Or an extra £1000 on my salary - you know, whatever's best.

I've got the boring thing out of the way now - the rest of the blog will be fabulous. Honestly.